People living in Russia or China might care.

I mean, okay, but they likely use VPNs to start with. There’s already heavily oppressive laws there. The point is Russia and China have no power to threaten Fediverse owners here.

UK might be much more difficult, btw. They now ban all porn without identity checks. So if you host a lemmy/piefed instance that’s accessible in the UK you will need to delete all adult content that makes it to your instance, if you don’t want to violate UK law.

I am from the UK. And lemmy.zip has geoblocked the UK because of this (the owner is from the UK). But no other instances has done anything so far.

Cloning communities isn’t quite that easy. Were you present when feddit.de went down? Their communities didn’t vanish. The replications are still up on all other instances, and you can still post there. There’s no indication to a casual user that the instance hosting the communities is down and thus federation doesn’t work. To the users it just looks like participation dropped like a rock with no obvious reason.

Keep in mind that Piefed actually has community migration now. There are moves being made here.