Thank you, yes that surprised me too. I know that they've made some improvements so I'm expecting them to be available in a newer release, then I'll try it again.

I'm using Torsocks 2.3.0 and DiG 9.20.1

It could be the exit node that you're using perhaps? Maybe you could try specifying a different exit node and trying again. Also check exit node policies to make sure DNS is allowed, although as your problem only seems to be with MX records then that might not be the cause.

A list comprehension is used to convert and/or filter elements of another iterable, in your case a range but this could also be another list. So you can think of it as taking one list, filtering/converting each element and producing a new list as a result.

So there's no need to append to any list as that's implicit in the comprehension.

For example, to produce a list of all squares in a range you could do:

[x*x for x in range(10)]

This would automatically "append" each square to the resulting list, there's no need to do that yourself.

mbsync to sync IMAP to my local machine, then mu4e in Emacs to manage everything

I think I remember reading about an existing project which aims to allow migration of followed communities, users, blocks, etc. between instances. I'd imagine that would be far cleaner than my quick solution so it might be worth a look!

I'll try cleaning mine up though and I'll post it here just in case it's useful.

I did exactly this today. I wrote a quick and dirty Python script to fetch followed communities from lemmy.ml and to follow those same communities on lemmy.sdf.org (the current instance I'm using).