I don’t know how you would force compliance with a different instance though, especially if it is not located in the EU.
In the end we can only control ourselves - e.g. note I’m writing this from a PieFed account:-). But yes Sublinks is a very exciting development as well, though I have not heard any developments for many months when it was mentioned that it was not stable yet.
And yes someone could fork the Lemmy codebase. Many instances including Lemmy.cafe and Tesseract on dubvee.org have done exactly that, though unlike Mbin (since Kbin is now defunct) they don’t want to get too far ahead of the main branch so that they can still receive future updates easier, whereas PieFed and Sublinks and Mbin are each entirely separate projects from Lemmy to begin with, though they are interoperable with those federated communities which is awesome 😎.
Thanks 👍