It increases load during execution. Afterward it’s not significant. My instance is heavily instrumented and monitored. The load this incurs subscribing to 24000 communities is less than adding a single, moderately active user to your instance.
It’s a huge miss if the intended design was to silo information.
What this provides, as far as I’m concerned, is essential to prevent centralization to a few instances.
Is there a better way to do it inherently in Lemmy itself? Probably, and I am excited to help with that!