lemmy currently only sends one activity per receiving instance at a time, so there is a round trip for every single post, comment, vote, etc., before the next activity will be sent. you wouldn't see any increased number of connections, as there's only a single one.
do you have access logs for /inbox with the lemmy.world's user agent? you might be able to derive some information from that if requests increased over time or something, maybe also response status codes?
starting with 0.19.4, at least user settings will default to their browser's accepted languages on registration: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/pull/4550
this doesn't solve actually tagging content, but it some progress at least.