I found that with the people I brought to steemit, some email address they use take longer than others, when I joined I used an icloud email address and it took 3 weeks for me to get in.
my friend used gmail and was in with in 24 hours, another used gmail on the saturday and was live by monday.

there are other ways of getting on steemit, you can by a steemit account using : https://anon.steem.network/ this is the quickes and most simple way. but costs 5 steem to get one. hope this helps :)