how does my home instance influence the loading speed of content from a different instance

lemmy world has like 85k ppl, lemmy ml has like 50k ppl, this means that there’s potentially tens of thousands of people browsing at the same time making requests to the lemmy.ml and lemmy.world servers, or whichever home server their instance is hosted on. If the server is not big enough to stand it, it becomes slow while it processes the bulk of the requests. Smaller instances have fewer people, which means that there’s fewer active people and servers have an easier job when they must process the requests of all of their users.