Fediverse

No-one cares what Russia or China thinks here. Germany? I mean, sure, but this is also a complication for any regulatory bodies trying to police social media sites. As "Lemmy" or "Piefed", as you know, are not singular entities.

People living in Russia or China might care.

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.

People would just clone the communities on other instances and rebuild.

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.

The communities were cloned onto a new instance (IIRC feddit.org) but even up to now, people keep posting to the old now-unfederated communities.

Btw: that's another quite critical issue: Lemmy lacks any and all migration tools. Can't migrate an instance to a new URL, can't migrate users or communities to other instances. All you can do is scrap all you had and start fresh.