Curious here how is storage an issue? Lemmy is 90% text and if you do the proxy for pictures its like 10%. If you use pictures from elsewhere and don't use pictures it's all text. I have had lemmy hosted for over a year now and it's using under 35GB. I have a not that subscribes to top posts on larger instances so I should have a lot of communities loaded.
Edit: oh yeah Pictrs integrates with S3 api now so you can offload image storage to cloud for pennies.
But that depends, if you are doing a human skull farm than of course it is. If your enemy would have lived to 80+ years otherwise this is 100℅ more environmental friendly. Also the skulls reusable I guess.