$0.99 per month to read all the comments on a thread, slowly increase the cost year-over-year and eventually add a second (initially) $0.99 per month to read any comments at all (because you should only read posts and only the ones we want you to see).

Try using the Progressive Web App (PWA) instead. I’m on iOS and haven’t found a good app for Lemmy yet but the PWA has helped me get used to Lemmy on my phone in place of Reddit. You just open the site in your phone’s native browser (Safari on iOS, probably Chrome on Android?) and choose “Save to Home Screen”. Now it looks like any other app and behaves like it too, even though it’s secretly just the web page.