That’s definitely not normal. The rendering can be a bit slow, but everything else shold be usable. Unless you have a low-range phone. If that is the case, I can recommend Organic Maps, which are much less resource-intensive.

Well, you can create an account from EU, although mine got locked after creating just one blog post. And the support does not seem to respond, so I moved to a different platform.

Peertube is a good federated alternative to Youtube, it also connects to the Fediverse and there is a central search engine called Sepia Search, which makes it easier to find content on the different instances.