That's why it's really important to have an option to share your own instance communities without receiving ones from others. Allows others to know of you, while not taking on more data load than you have to.

Yeah I'm one of those. Not only is there A LOT of data on the fediverse that I would have to pay to host, but there is A LOT of NSFW/nsfl things too. When I come across it I defederate it. It would be a flood of things if I just blindly federated with everyone

I still think it will not explode bandwidth and storage, but I can't argue because I don't have any valid evidence :)

The reason I say this is that communities take up a few bytes in the database and if there is no activity (post/comment), they don't use any bandwidth either.

However, I can't say anything about the organic /all tab argument. It's a matter of preference. Kind of funny one.

i do this also with one of the local bot accounts so new users will find stuff on my instance easier. keeps the the 'all/new' queue churning for superscrollers

Probably wouldn't be well received since for them it's individual people, not communities which you follow. Would be considered botting their profiles. It's different with communities though.

Not sure, sorry. I don't really use Mastodon all that much, maybe somebody else knows?

There are some instances which can't handle the load of communities being pulled into them, since it does eat up a lot of storage. It would be good if there were a mode that allows federating an instance's communities outward without pulling in any from other instances.