It’s already pretty light.
The main discourse page without any caching already done is 882KB.
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584
Which has a notible amount of avatars, with the initial cache blown out too, is 1.1MB.
Keeping the cache present and browing around, posts such as
https://meta.discourse.org/t/ability-to-follow-and-friend-other-users/1584
Was all of 11.6KB.
The initial load is obviously where the largest ‘hit’ comes in, but since it’s a 1 time thing, and the posts being quite small, I don’t think much work could really be done to improve their ‘persistent’ experience.
Have you had them do traceroutes to see if it’s definitely the stack that is causing the issue and not a routing issue?