Everyone that was willing to bear the actual operating costs would prefer to run their own servers to serve themselves,

That's a mathematical (and behavioural) indicative that your offering was simply not good enough for the target audience. If the people willing to put in the money and time were preferring to do it on their own for that same sum, it means you don't have enough aggregated value or distinctive non-operational functionality ("perks" or "affiliations", basically) to be unloading that value of cost on your potential users.

Reminder: we are in an era where our kind of people (focused on privacy, sovereignty, etc) know better than to commit to future payment for stuff because when you start paying for stuff, it gets Enshittified; an upstart in the current landscape is alas much more vulnerable to that.