Yep just ping time and latency make this a no go for a vast majority of us.

My pi costs probably around 20 a year lol.

I have the same issue. I have a very small instance and lemmy.world seems to not work no matter what I do. I can get lemmy ml no issues and done if the others but for done reason world just won’t work with and communities, like everything is blacklisted or something.

Tape drive to USB are a great solution.

There are tape drives that are certified to last for a very long time and are as easy as USB plug ins. Looks like a brick and is as heavy as one. Very low speed but you can pack a lot of data for a very long time in one.