pitninja

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.

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.

What do you mean by nefarious exactly? I don’t get the impression that it’s evil…