I wish there was an alternative to leaving Reddit
Unfortunately with the current structure of things, that’s probably what will have to happen for a bit.
Lemmy is decentralized and federated and there are pros and cons to that system. One of those is that users expect a completely free experience. However, I have a server at home, but I have no way of scaling it. So despite there being a community I’d love to spin up, I can’t because I have no way of scaling it.
Most people are going to have to go through Cloud providers for that, which can get pricey.