I did a lot of that building up because there wasn’t much content that interested me coming through.
In hindsight it may have meant I should have chosen a different instance but now it’s done I’m pretty happy and as you mentioned, it expanded the content for other users on the instance
The moderation policy can be important, on lemmy.zip they’re somewhat anti-defederation so I spent a half hour banning all the big communities from the problematic instances