In effect, not really.

All the communities you’re subscribed to will now also have to push all their updates (posts, comments, upvotes) to your server, even when you’re not interacting with Lemmy.

As someone else mentioned, it would only be efficient once you have a decent (hard to pinpoint) amount of users on your server.

I can say with full confidence that I have absolutely no idea.

I’ve heard this idea thrown around before, so I take no credit for it: One way to circumvent the issue would be to have actual relay nodes. As in: nodes that don’t hold contents or users themselves, but just “broadcast” incoming messages to several instances, so that the source instances don’t have to. This would of course have its own drawbacks and limitations, but it would alleviate the bottleneck.

I’m sure some kind of solution will be found though. Call me optimistic, but I think the lemmi/binniverse has a bright future ahead of it. I, for one, have burned my reddit bridges.

You definitely could, but it’s not really sustainable.

Worst case scenario: if everybody does this, and there’s 50.000 subscribers on a certain community, then that community will have to update 50.000 other servers whenever one user leaves a single message or vote.

Sure, your own server wouldn’t have a hard time, but it every popular server (with lots of subscribers) would. It would either take a long time for you to receive their updates, or you wouldn’t get them at all.

The best thing you can do, is join a medium size server: it won’t be as overloaded as a big server, and wouldn’t cause as much strain on the fediverse as a personal server.