being at the family home where the internet speed (downlink) reaches 1MB/s at most and there's three other people that also use it from time to time makes it painfully evident how long it takes for PleromaFE to load on slow connections

right from the start there's a javascript blob which weighs a few megabytes and it takes a few seconds to load all the basic assets. then the avatars start loading and oh boy are some of them heavy. an image resized to roughly 50x50 pixels should not EVER weigh over a megabyte or even close to that (for example @orekix, whose avatar is 719KB)
same with custom emoji. more than 10kb per a piece is just preposterous and here it's a spectrum, as there are some minimal ones that comfortably fit under a kilobyte (the cirno ones are great ) and on the other hand there's - at least here - taking the lead with 365KB
I know both aren't problems of Pleroma itself and it's my fault that I decided to import some large emoji; however, even if you somehow squash the emoji/avatars on your instance, there will still be incoming ones unless you cut yourself off from the federation
of course there are also images in posts, but those can be disabled and loaded on demand so who really cares

and, of course, it's possible that I've been just sleeping way to much on Pleroma development so far and there are ways to optimize assets, and I simply haven't enabled them