"Simple" is a relative thing, so I'll simply point you to some options that exist, and you can judge for yourself: https://fediverse.party/en/fediverse/

Also, Nextcloud has been used for the use-case you described...its less about sharing in the social media sense, and more about exposing a bunch of media/photos/videos that live on your local/home server or your VPS (that is running nextcloud). https://nextcloud.com/

Thks, by simple I meant to use, I'm not concerned about the setup requirements. Also I'm looking for something more along the lines of the social tour sharing of photos where we can tag and label them as we share them. I've used next cloud briefly, is not quite what I'm after.

I'll look into the other. Thanks

Nextcloud can fit your usecase with the external storage plugin

I'm building it, and would love to hear your feedback: https://blog.photostructure.com/introducing-photostructure/

I've got a desktop installer you can test now. I'm working out kinks with snap and docker builds currently. If you sign up via email I can send you instructions tomorrow.

making it trivial to spin up your own instance is a stated goal of Pixelfed. I'm not sure how close it is but last time I checked it wasn't bad. Just a series of simple commands to follow.

so, to answer your question. Yes, Pixelfed is something that looks simple like that and you can host yourself. You don't have to open accounts up to random people.

By simple I mean it's interface, not the setup, I'm not _too_ concerned about the setup, but I'd like to try a few different options so the easier it is the more likely I'm going to try it.

My concerns with Pixelfed are; first I don't understand how the federated part works at this point and how that relates to running a standalone instance, and also, it appears to be early days which is a risk, in my eyes to opening something in early development to the internet.