Most servers that I am interested on joining are hosted in Europe/US. The ping on those servers are usually 200-400 ms compared to big mastodon instances like fosstodon.org and universeodon.com (20-50 ms). Would this affect the responsiveness in a noticeable way?
Not really that important, the first load might be really slow, but after that it should be smooth. The api responses will be slower, but it doesn’t matter that much.