Usually feels like
Minutes
You stay at the keyboard and it finishes there.
The hashing is slow on purpose and the door is heavily rate limited, yet it finishes at the keyboard and hands you something to write down.
The wait, in plain words
The form was short. A name, a passphrase, perhaps a picture to answer, and then the button. What follows is a page that is thinking, and it thinks for longer than the size of what you typed suggests it should.
The gap is between having submitted a registration and having something you can sign into. Those are not the same moment. Until the far side has finished writing there is no account, and a sign in attempt would fail even with every character typed correctly.
Treat the end of this wait as the start of a small job rather than the end of one. What appears when it finishes often includes material that is displayed once and never again, and the screen holding it will not warn you twice that it is about to go.
Underneath, while nothing moves
Registration is a write, and several things are being written. A name is reserved so nobody else can take it. Your passphrase is put through a deliberately slow hashing function, slow so that a stolen database is expensive to attack rather than trivial. A record is created. Frequently a recovery secret is generated, and frequently that is the only moment it exists in a form a person can read.
Markets of this shape also treat registration as their most abused door. It is the one endpoint that lets somebody manufacture accounts in bulk, so it is usually rate limited, often gated, and sometimes queued behind the same front layer as everything else. The slowness you feel is partly hashing and partly queue, and you cannot tell the two apart from outside.
If a public key is asked for, there is parsing and validation to do as well, and a challenge may be prepared for the first time you sign in. None of this is heavy in machine terms. It is heavy in queue terms, which is what decides the band it lands in.
One more thing is being decided in the gap, and it is the reason the wait is worth respecting. A recovery secret is generated once and shown once because a market that could show it to you again could also show it to whoever talks their way into your session. The single display is not laziness. It is the property that makes the secret worth anything at all, and it is spent the moment the page is replaced.
Behaving, and not behaving
A registration either took or it did not, and the difference becomes visible almost immediately after the wait ends.
A registration that took
The page moves on to something you have not seen before. A confirmation, a recovery secret, or a session already signed in.
The name you chose is shown back to you spelled the way you typed it, and signing out and in again works on the first try.
A registration that did not
You are returned to the same form, usually with the fields blank and a short message about the name or the passphrase.
Or the page ends somewhere generic, and the name you chose is then refused as taken, which is a sign the first attempt got further than it looked.
That last case is the awkward one. A registration can succeed on the far side and fail to tell you, leaving an account you own and cannot demonstrate you own. Try signing in with exactly what you typed before you submit the form a second time. Submitting again is how people end up holding two accounts and a limiter counting both of them.
Whatever happens, do not improvise a new name at this point. A name invented in a hurry is a name you will not remember, and the recovery route for a forgotten name is usually no route at all. An account locked without a reason is far harder to argue about when you cannot say with confidence which account you mean.
Safe to do meanwhile
This is the wait in the band with homework attached, and the homework is easier if it is ready before the page finishes rather than after.
- Have paper and a pen in front of youMaterial shown once is shown while you are still on that screen and not afterwards.
- Keep the passphrase somewhere you can reach without this machineA passphrase held only in the browser you registered from is one failure away from gone.
- Read what the next wait involvesThe pause after signing in is short, and it behaves nothing like this one.
- Decide what you will do if it fails twiceRepeated attempts are what trigger the wait you least want to be in.
What makes it longer
Registration is brief unless you or the market make it otherwise.
- Submitting the form a second time because the first attempt felt slow.
- A name already taken, which sends the whole thing back to the beginning.
- A password manager filling fields after the page has already moved on, so what is stored and what was sent disagree.
- A gate in front of the market, which stacks its own wait on top of this one.
- Registering while the market is under load, when writes queue behind everything else being written.
What this card is not. This card is not advice on what to put in a registration form, and it does not say what any particular market asks for.