As I understand it the federation protocol is copying all the data from instance to instance. I think data is probably going to be the most taxing part of running a social media site, but since all the data is replicated, there wont be much load sharing there. Each instance will be taking care of the cpu/load requirements of rendering/serving the pages for their users, so there is some scaling benefits there to distribution. Anyway, I’m also still learning as well! I think we all are lol