Usually, when you open a website, that site might be pulling live data from somewhere, but it's from a database on the same server. If you click a Fediverse link, and no-one else from your instance has already done so, it seems like your instance has to contact a remote site, pull the data and render it, in the same timeframe it would have to do so with local data.

To illustrate with some possibly-new-to-you examples:
!cyberpunk@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
!badrealestate@feddit.uk
!sideoftheroad@possumpat.io
!todayilearned@chat.maiion.com
!rpgmemes@ttrpg.network
!grenoble@jlai.lu
!relationshipmemes@lemmyis.fun

What's your experience like clicking these? Does it go through first time?
I realize they'll be people for whom these work first time no problem, and they'll wonder what I'm complaining about. I'm not really complaining about anything really, I'm just wondering if my instinctive reaction has any validity.

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[–] stu@lemmy.pit.ninja 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

What you've described is exactly how it's supposed to work. Once a user has subscribed to an external community from your instance, it should load immediately for any users afterwards.

[–] freamon@endlesstalk.org 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I realize this. How well it works for User 2 isn't super-relevant for User 1's experience. And if you're from a small instance, you'll always be User 1. To me, it seems like the answer to if the page will successfully load for User 1 is 'maybe', and I guess I was questioning whether this is good enough.

[–] stu@lemmy.pit.ninja 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I see, well I guess the real question is whether it can be improved at the server/protocol level and my answer is I don't know. There's some handshaking that clearly has to occur between your instance and the other instance to load the initial community state and I don't know where that process can be optimized. I think I've seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don't have a link to such a tool handy.

Edit, and there's never going to be a guarantee that your server can talk to their server until you try clicking the link because the other server could be overloaded, down, or blocking your server.

[–] freamon@endlesstalk.org 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I think I’ve seen people mention tools that have been created to automatically subscribe a dummy account on your instance to all the communities on the largest instances to kind of bootstrap the process for other users, but I don’t have a link to such a tool handy

They have a bot at lemmings.world that subs to the most popular communities. It's mostly to benefit their 'All' feed I think, but I imagine it's good for this circumstance too.

[–] Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 points 1 year ago

This is the tool that was mentioned if you're interested.

Discussion thread: https://lemmy.management/post/665809

[–] 6daemonbag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

~~On a smaller instance, the first link didn't work for me :(~~

Nevermind, sync didn't recognize the rest of the url