15 minutes drive to my MIL and 4 hours to my own Mom.
My dad used to do tech support and wants to learn some of this stuff while he's recovering from surgery and I'm at my MILs several times a month anyways. So it all works out. Also it's only fair as the FIL has helped me do so much with my car over the years I wanted to pay them back and he likes movies more than me.
I could see that as a privacy measure.
Everything on Lemmy is open anyways but maybe the maintainer didn't want to be the guy to make Lemmy data that accessible. So it's a limitation. You can only have Lemmy data if you are hosting the server and the community.