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Hey that’s me!
If you’re excited, hop on, as have I! The protocol related scaling issue will resolve itself over time; a few of us are throwing ideas out and hoping some will stick with the developers.
But just bear in mind that you’re not adding to the network scaling because federation on the big servers will not be alleviated by you (or me) having an extra instance.
For my personally, I'm hosting an instance so that I can play with it, but also so that I can test new functionality, and help fix issues.
So I think if you are concerned about being a burden, then actively use your instance for the betterment of lemmy!
ActivityPub traffics are not that heavy. The activities are queued in the background and processed by a pool of dedicated workers, so no matter how long the queue, they should not bog the webserver down. Each entry in the queue does occupy some memory, but should be negligible.
I would say that an active users subscribing to a community using their own instance is actually generating less server load to the subscribed community's instance compared to a user in that instance actively interacting with the community directly. But, if you subscribe using a personal instance but never actually use it (never logging in, never interacting with the community, never lurking in any discussion, basically forgot it exists), then yeah, you're probably a dead weight, albeit a tiny one.
It's been said here that accessing content from the large servers via a federation connection is less taxing on the servers than accessing them directly, so there's that.
I’m thinking this would be the case if your instance had more than 1 user subscribed to that community in the large instance - but if it is just you, wouldn’t it be similar to accessing each instance and viewing the communities there?
No. Operations like removing blocked user comments, tracking your subscriptions themselves (showing only yours when you're on teh subscription tab), and tracking your sessions are all database heavy operations. You would be trading database heavy operations with "origin needs to send activity pub messages" to you. Activitypub messages were already being generated and is simply just also sent to you... it's very little network traffic and that's it.
As long as your instance views most content it receives at least once... you're well above par for doing your work to lighten the load on the origin server.
As what I understood, actually it makes things worse. This shouldn't be the case because the concept of fediverse itself is to have a lot of many instances communicating with each other.
The problem is the Lemmy is still a young project and we weren't expecting all this explosion in users. activityPub implementation doesn't scale well for now and so adding a new instance theoretically makes things worse.
But this is something that devs have as a high priority, in my opinion, because is very important to have instances correctly communicating with each other, otherwise the concept of federation falls.