[trh0awayman]

Just to update my comment so that readers don't get the wrong idea: I went back and tested it again today. It's a lot faster than when I tried it. I still have things like "Fetching user count..." for groups that never seems to update, though.

[humanizersequel]

That almost certainly has to do with the user who hosts the group not having their Urbit running when you tried to join.

Also, just to have it in this thread, most of the slowness when using Urbit has to do with poor frontend optimization. The network itself is actually quite snappy.