Humans who run instances are real people who have jobs and mortgages and kids. I also like having piracy communities around to balance the greedy ass corporations trying to control media and copyright…I’m glad to know they are there if I need them or feel like screwing around with it. I just wonder if the people ranting all indignantly acting like instances are competing for their usership would feel the same if the most active instance was on a server physically sitting in their basement, or paid for by money tied to them in the real world. Yes it seems pretty unlikely that you’re ever going to run into issues with law enforcement, copyright claims, lawsuits…but how much would you risk for a fucking hobby you do for free? Would you risk your house? Your job? I would not. Grow up. No one cares what instance you use.
Firefish does let you import your Mastodon GDPR export, so it can be done. However the problem Lemmy will need to solve if it wants to offer this functionality is that all those posts are bound to new accounts, so you’ll either have duplicate posts or they won’t be shown.
A “true” post migration feature that replaces the owner of an existing post (as opposed to making backdated posts) would likely need an ActivityPub extension that the entire ecosystem an agree to, and of course that needs to consider proper authorization so a malicious instance can’t take over an account with a malicious migration request.