For my personally, I'm hosting an instance so that I can play with it, but also so that I can test new functionality, and help fix issues.

So I think if you are concerned about being a burden, then actively use your instance for the betterment of lemmy!

My recommendation is get an instance going, run it in that latest release candidate, if not the bleeding edge / build from source. Find and report issues. Since you are in DevOps, help expand the operational side / documentation.

I had a PR yesterday to fix nginx config, which you could probably have done as well? Help other people with their instances, document solutions. There are lots of places where you can apply your set of skills, rather than trying to learn Rust and just write code

Maybe look at figuring out how to host your own instance? I've got mine running on a 2 thread, 1gb ram server that'll cost me less than 10 usd a month. So far it actually seems to run rather smoothly.

Then you get to choose who you federate with.

My personal instance is 2 vcpu 1gb ram and 30gb storage. It's just me using it, but it's running rather decently, so maybe if it's just a few people you could get away with something like that

AWS on a free tier ec2

So wefwef.app only lists the biggest instances, and doesn't allow you to browse instances with logging in to that instance... Yet.

I suspect the dev will add functionality so browse other instances without logging in soon.

But if you would like to browse other instances, then create an account for that instance and then on wefwef you'll be able to login using it.

Gitlab and such generally have issue trackers built in, maybe that would be a good solution?