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.
I joined early stuff was unstable. I couldn’t join one that was in my country (UK) and eventually managed to join one in Oz without knowing - just my luck!
I don’t have any noticeable delays in content loading unless there’s a general problem with the version of Lemmy.