Should the front end be waiting on a response from the server in this case?

yha, it is unusual. But I like it at this point, as it exposes the general problem. It isn’t trivial to populate the database (there is no current back-fill procedure for new instances) and user traffic to match the big sites (Beehaw, Lemmy.world, Lemmy.ml) - so at least I can get a sense of what ‘standard performance’ is considered.