Since you say you are new, I’ll point out that what you are experiencing could be entirely normal and that there isn’t much you can do beyond be patient and be prepared to try again sometimes. One ‘best practice’ is to make sure you launch once before you send anyone else there in your region.
You seem to be already checking on other browsers and systems, which is a good practice when things seem ‘odd’ as a browser on a particular computer can get stuck in a glitch for days and not connect correctly. This is very rare and I’ll discuss it more below.
For further explanation:
As different points in the Binder Federation get sent your repo, every time it gets updated they have to rebuild. Occasionally that will also coincide with some updates being propagated through the Binder system or a new pod being launched to handle the demand. Both of those sorts of things can make it take the 10 minutes you are seeing. These events have to happen in the public system, and so you cannot fix that other than hosting your own BinderHub or JupyterHub where you serve your notebooks or app to select users. But it is rare you get those events and usually it is much less than 10 minutes for a new pod or node to get set up. But I’m mentioning that up front as it does happen from time to time.
And keep in mind users in other zones may get sent to a different Binder Federation member and have to build your repo into a docker session and launch there. This is normal. Most users of the public and free system have become accustomed to be patient and let the repo build.
It more likely sounds like you are experiencing on your computer when Chrome gets a glitch in it , see here and here where it never connects really and the logs are blank. If that is what you initially saw, then maybe you have an ad blocker or you were just unfortunate to get a glitch in your browser on your computer. I’ve seen it happen with Chrome when I’m iterating a lot on building. Suddenly I can no longer connect with Chrome on that computer but other machines work. I don’t know if I’ve tried incognito mode as a solution for when that happens and so it was interesting you raise that observation.