It takes some time to build op your surroundings. It depends on how fast your computer (incl. graphics card) is and for servers how fast they are and your and their internet connection.
You can press r for the max. view range. r again to disable max, then you can use - to decrease the distance you can see and (shift) + to increase the distance. But still it takes some (more or less) time to build up.
You can also put lines in your minetest.conf to influence the range and build up:
for example:
viewing_range_nodes_max = 160 # maximum view range (in nodes)
viewing_range_nodes_min = 35 # minimum view range (in nodes)
read for more info this post:
http://minetest.net/forum/viewtopic.php?id=3197