That’s just how federation works. You’ve federated with an instance/user so now your self hosted instance will be updated.
Is there a reason you’re concerned about the requests? The payloads should be relatively small, and unless you’re running on some really old hardware, one request a second with a small payload should not have any noticeable impact.
Played the demo on steam, and the games were really fun. This pack feels a little different in that the couple of demo games were very “oh wow we could actually sit down and play this game” vibes vs. Just a quick thing to throw on in the background of a party.