Yes, the initial syncing and indexing can take a moment. I would recommend joining a single Pub or SSB room [1] to find people and grow your network organically. The large Pubs [2] have a lot of content to download and also follow bots (which you would have to block).

[1] https://github.com/staltz/ssb-room/blob/master/FAQ.md [2] https://github.com/ssbc/ssb-server/wiki/Pub-Servers