Storage is cheap but at scale the bandwidth requirements are too much for hobbyists to handle

we’re more comfortable moderationally, but on the technical side we are flying this by the seat of our pants. none of us are big on coding, so we’re not really able to add to Lemmy’s base functionalities

This is how it is supposed to be fwiw, great to see that people are approaching this from the social perspective rather than technical. You should not feel pressured to be developers or programming experts to run a community, those are totally different disciplines. Hopefully the resources to manage instances improve so that becomes an easier task