That sounds like it would immediately exclude a huge number of potential participants from doing something similar.
The media storage is dirt cheap but it grows with the instance and users. One major issue some instance admins have is a lot of users uploading a lot of data.
My instance is very small and also blocked registrations to EU.
I expect to have enough capacity left over in my existing cluster to also host lemmy.
A given community can pool money on a server of their own, and federate it with other communities' servers if they want.
I remember people doing it with TeamSpeak, Minecraft, Counter-strike, etc. server, its the same !
The great thing about federation is that you don't have to host an entire community; just a slice of it.
The public timeline of all instances is by default public, without authentication. So technically you could scrape them.
Also I must advocate relaying. ActivityPub relays are very simple servers that receive all posts from any subscribed instance. Not just mastodon either, multiple AP services supported.
And then relays those posts to all subscribed instances.
Relaying does wonders for the public timeline of a small localized instance.
When I saw lemmy my first thought was that I wanted to host my own instance of this once federation works.
I'm already hosting mastodon and synapse instances for the community. I believe strongly in hosting small federated community instances. This hobby costs me about 80USD/mon.