I'm not talking about the administrator of this instance, I'm talking about how mastodon is fundamentally designed. Even an iPhone could probably serve the (static) text of Tao's post to a million people on a 5G connection. Computers are fast.

Mastodon's architecture inherently does not prioritize speed of first page load. Any PR would be rejected :D

Something like Mastodon is likely 90% reads, or even more. How often is the OP editing their post? When they post, cache it. Kind of like what I did by including it in my original post. Caching is a hard problem because sometimes invalidation results in serious consequences, therefore knowing when to invalidate becomes potentially intractable. In this case there would be few, if any.

it was cache invalidation, and naming things. Just throwing stuff in cache is easy.

Why would it be difficult to cache static text?

yes, and unfortunately almost all of the servers are unable to cope with even a moderate amount of traffic

Twitter is a far better user experience in that respect, to the point that I actively avoid clicking mastadon links now because they fail so often