Unless things have changed recently (last year or so), the SDF Mastodon servers are really slow and terrible at federating. They even had an incident where the servers failed, everyone lost their posts and had to start over again. Downtime was terrible.

SDF welcomed everyone openly during the initial Mastodon waves, so it was all very Eternal September.

If you're joining to make a spare account to participate with SDF people, awesome! But if you want it as your identity for all of Fedi, I think that would be a bad experience. I ended up getting my own MastoHost account for a while and it was a vastly better experience, until I burned out on Fedi.

SDF is a super fun place to experiment with Gopher though. I absolutely recommend getting your own Gopherhole on SDF. It's like the old Geocities days but in ASCII. (And make sure you grab Lagrange as your GUI Gopher / Gemini client. I liked Phetch as my terminal Gopher client.)

The performance hit was due to database work they were doing on the instance. Now it's a lot faster. The latest announcement reads as follows:

    We've completed our first phase of database clean up, thank you for your patience.  The impact on performance was heavy, but it was a necessary step.  All active users and their posts, profile, connections and media will be migrated to the new servers.  Once that has been completed, any remaining data will stay online for further migration and clean up.  Our instance is nearly 10 years old of constant daily operation, but we ran into a migration wall which held us back on 4.1.x.  Now that it is deprecated, we will do our best to jump to the latest version rather than migrate through.  Your support and patience has been greatly appreciated.