It looks like the lack of persistent storage for the federated activity queue is leading to instances running out of memory in a matter of hours. See my comment for more details.
Furthermore, this leads to data loss, since there is no other consistency mechanism. I think it might be a high priority issue, taking into account the current momentum behind growth of Lemmy…
Buckets are like databases in traditional relational databases. Here’s the doc on how to filter which documents get replicated.
https://docs.couchdb.org/en/stable/replication/intro.html#controlling-which-documents-to-replicate