The slowness and bugs might be due to the sudden influx of people from Twitter. I just joined a small server that is now having to scale up a bit to accommodate all the new traffic, and I assume the more popular servers are seeing an even bigger bump.

I was actually expecting the sign up process to be a lot more difficult than it was for me, just based on the impression I'd gotten from various HN comments over the years. I encourage anyone curious to try it out for themselves.