Ya for every action we take, that could mean 500+ service calls that the instance itself has to make. (Just go to /instances on any server and count the number that are listed). And that's assuming that everyone is only communicating on their own instances and just lurking on content from other instances.

I'm currently trying to build an enhanced search engine just for the fediverse, my first thought was to build essentially an instance that has no communities and would subscribe to literally everything to get updates, but after looking at the ActivityPub protocol I'm worried that my server would instantly crash from all of the network traffic. I'm not quite ready to shell out for anything larger than a Pi just yet. So now I'm looking to see what I can do with the public APIs and just Lemmy. This way I can poll for the data rather than receive pushes....