I believe you can reply locally on your instance to dead communities, but that data would never be replicated to other instances. The fediverse isn't really a mesh network, more like a hub and spoke on a per community level.
It's probably torrent clients doing a ping test of peers to check latency. Ops VPN server replies to the ping so they look close, even though they're not.
I can't imagine a client that would ship an ip2geo db to bother trying to look up locations. Just doesn't make any sense.
Fixed now!