No rudeness felt here! I really do appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. These conversations are important. A few thoughts:

• I think we were all taken aback by some of the accusatory tone and misrepresentations in the Snoo’s posts and comments here and on the first submission. Mike and Devgard are quite reasonable and considerate folks, as you can see from their approach to this thread when they thought we had been trying to promote the new community in theirs.
• In terms of instances, there’s no real difference when it comes to where the community is hosted. Users still login through their home instance and content is still propagated across the Fediverse (every single federated instance hosts a cached copy of that content). This is why there’s no effective difference to the end-user if an instance is relocated other than the URL becoming slightly longer (from lemmy.world/c/android to lemmy.world/c/android@lemdro.id).
• Ultimately, both teams needed help (moderation is currently significantly more tedious on Lemmy than Reddit) and using a specialized instance makes a lot of sense for the Fediverse. The alternative of leaving the older one open but less moderated would be worse considering the spam and scams already appearing (including those trying to recommend random apk files that are most assuredly malicious).
• On the GDPR, I appreciate you raising this. There are some questions and challenges that remain for all of Lemmy itself considering how content is cached across instances by default. My understanding is that this hasn’t quite been settled for Mastodon either. A number of us are big fans of the GDPR, even those of us to whom it doesn’t directly apply (but we often still benefit when companies implement mechanisms to come into compliance). I personally intend to investigate how Lemmy handles purged content but we should have some basic language filled out soon.
• On the instance operations, a lot of work has been done and continues toward scaling. That includes vertically (e.g., server resource specifications automatically increase and decrease as needed) and horizontally (e.g., automatically spin up separate server instances to share loads). Some of this is already in place, which has kept costs very reasonable. More is underway that should bring them down even more drastically and set it up well for higher traffic. It’s currently funded by Cole who has committed to us his willingness to do so - but there are many others among us willing to chip in funding and server resources. The plan is for everything about lemdro.id to be open source - including any to have any custom code and cost-saving techniques to be published on Github, as well as to have closed administrator chats be publicly visible. The aim is for long-term longevity that could outlive anyone currently involved.