That’s actually better I think. A project with zero open issues/requests is usually dead, not fast in solving issues.

The resources required by federating depend on how many people follow each other across those two instances and how much these post. Just existing and theoretically federating doesn’t need any resources if there’s nobody following, assuming threads isn’t doing that different from everyone else.

For each post a user makes on your instance, it sends that post to each instance where someone follows the poster. There’s no automatic sending to every known instance of every post on your instance.