

Even the old monolithic sites started out with a lot of tech folks as the initial population. It’s tech. Such is the way of things.
Here maybe the effect is stronger because of the similar ethos between the Fediverse and free software like Linux.
Give it time.
On my last computer I found that the boot process was looking for things that weren’t there but that the motherboard had rudimentary functionality for like a floppy drive. It didn’t even have a connector for one.
For whatever reason, that caused a 10-30 second delay while the kernel tried to determine if there was a floppy drive connected. Pretty sure I had everything disabled via the BIOS but apparently it wasn’t disabled enough and the kernel could still see it.
That required throwing something into the system config, probably somewhere in /etc/modprobe.d, to blacklist that particular kernel module.
There was another problematic module as well; I can’t remember what that was, but I’m pretty sure it was the same fix. Got the boot time to login screen down to less than 10 seconds.
But all that said, even on this computer where the boot time is pretty quick, I usually put the computer into suspend mode to keep times down.