Oh, okay, fair. So this means that the search for new communities to browse/federate with is less troublesome, the more users populate an instance. On the flip side, if I'm considering self-hosting as one single user, I should anticipate:

• having a fairly long phase of community discovery, unless I already know which communities I'm interested in;
• that those communities that I do federate with will not give me any data prior to the moment I federated with them (is there a cache system to avoid this? can I go specifically retrieve older posts?)
• an important need for storage space, as I essentially become a duplicate of the server for every community I federated with, from that point on.

Is this correct?

Wait, so pardon my noobism, but does this mean you need to federate with communities manually? Don't instances start out as already being federated with everything?

Also Italy, can confirm. However in my experience when the water is contaminated here, people don't bother boiling the tap water, they just use bottled instead. (A weird moment of cognitive dissonance is that from what I've seen people still cook with tap water even when that is the case.)