We could use extra nodes and that would be super helpful, currently our nodes consume ~6 GB of ram and 4 cores at ~3Ghz with a 100 Mbps+ uplink/downlink. When ShadowChat is live we can discuss this more! We greatly appreciate your desire to help scale the system further than it already is capable of!
To start, the big big thing is really running a full steem witness/node. Our "nodes" are limited by the number of nodes available both locally and publicly that actually interact with the steem blockchain. ShadowBot is designed to use an API to interact with the low level blockchain, this makes the code far easier to expand and build, BUT, also relies then on steem nodes.
Steem nodes are costly! They require over 200 GB of ram and will scale to over 1 TB of ram soon.. They require 8+ cores and at least a 1 Gbps uplink/downlink! If you are up for the task and get a working witness we would be glad to consider endorsing you and using your node!
We will be sure to add you to the beta of ShadowChat to discuss everything more as we expand!