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.
The trending communities link is fantastic and to be honest a community I wish was a default subscription for new accounts. There is no official algorithm for “trending communities” in the Lemmy software as far as I know and the field called that in the browser is actually just “newly created communities”.