Should I de-federate while mass-importing content?

If I'm importing a butt-load of content into my instance, should I temporarily set federation: { enabled: false } while importing to avoid pissing other instance-admins off?

I'm assuming my instance could face some repercussions like:

• being rate-limited
• being blacklisted
• clogging remote search indexes up with gigs of crap
• flooding remote feeds and pissing off remote users

Am I wrong?
Am I missing something?
Is there a better way to prevent these side-effects?