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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[–] kglitch@kglitch.social 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You got it.

This is a limitation of the ActivityPub protocol so similar kinds of behaviour / problems shows up in mastodon, etc as well. Until someone subscribes, it doesn't exist locally and posts don't start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

[–] pokemaster787@ani.social 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Until someone subscribes, it doesn’t exist locally and posts don’t start to flow unless there is a subscriber.

So does this mean that if I'm browsing "All" I'm not actually seeing "All" but "All from the communities/instances members of my instance subscribe to"?

[–] SmashingSquid@notyour.rodeo 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes

[–] pokemaster787@ani.social 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

That explains a lot, then. When I was on Vlemmy before it was deleted "All" seemed a lot more populated, now I moved to a smaller instance and it seems a lot more repetitive.

It's a shame it works that way since everyone says the "ideal" is a ton of small instances rather than big ones.

Thanks for the clarification!

[–] kglitch@kglitch.social 2 points 1 year ago

Yup. You need to use a third party service like https://lemmyverse.net/communities and then subscribe.

There's no reason why this functionality can't be built into lemmy/kbin in future. It's on the feature wishlist for the lemmy/kbin clone that I'm building.