No problem 😀

I don't think it's possible to contribute distributed resources in a normal sense, since the ActivityPub protocol being used is server-to-server (If I make a comment on this post from lemmy.one, the lemmy.one server sends that to the lemmy.world server, which will update it's 'master' copy of the post, and then send that update to other federated servers). There's a spec page that explains this a lot better than me if you're interested: https://www.w3.org/TR/activitypub/#Overview

There might be a way for you to contribute some of your spare compute power in a way that I'm not aware of (maybe one of the underlying technologies, like postgres for the db, or pictrs which is used to handle images?) but I'm not familiar with how that could work

So far, the closest thing would be mods from large reddit communities spinning up their own Lemmy instance for their users to migrate to (like programming.dev from r/programming, and lemmy.dbzer0.com from r/piracy) which helps distribute the users across servers in general without needing to necessarily explain the benefits of doing that or federation in general.

As for supporting instances in general, most are accepting donations (links usually available in the sidebar shown on an instance's homepage) and using that money to upgrade their instance specs, or moving to a dedi server