Amazing what a decent UX will do.
Nah mate, they'll just download the official Reddit app. You severely overestimate how much the average Redditor actually cares about all this.
If you want me to make this "my new Reddit", then I'm going to treat it like Reddit.
That means down voting the majority of the posts I see.
100GB is practically nothing nowadays.
There are people (myself included, not to brag) running home servers with literally hundreds of terabytes of data. At that ~0.3 GB/day number, I alone could host 3,500 years worth of data. Get some of those r/DataHoarders and r/HomeLab guys on here and Lemmy would never run out of space.
Just go back to IRC if you hate it that much.
Same problem Mastodon had, the content consumers joined, but the content creators didn't, so there was nothing on the platform to engage with.
And let's be real, Lemmy is going to face the same fate when inevitably the Reddit protest ends in a couple days and everyone goes back to Reddit. Reddit is going to survive.
That's not how mortgages work...