Lemmy Support

I'm just trying to gauge if the performance gain will be worth the additional effort and have some questions. Was directed here from asklemmy.

I've read that back end communication is relatively cheap compared to end user content presentation in Lemmy. So, that leads me to believe that if I host my own instance, even without any communities, it would present content from other instances to me faster and more reliably. Are these assumptions correct?

Does an instance do any content caching for other instances? Ie, if I browse asklemmy@lemmy.ml and someone else does the same, will my instance need to make new requests to lemmy.ml?

Are images caches from other instances?

Obviously if my instance goes down, there's no service. Is there some sort of high availability or clustering supported?

Are updates relatively straightforward on Docker? I assume just pull the new image and you're good to go, or are there usually database migrations to complete outside of that?

Thanks for reading!