The creator of Lemmy, dessalines, is a tankie, and is also the main admin of lemmy.ml.
I support the Fediverse but here is one of its problems that needs to be negotiated.
As an individual poster, if an instance bans you or defederates instances that you would like to communicate with, you can wander off to another instance. It’s bad, but it’s not the worst.
As a (prospective) moderator, you have to recognize the danger that an overactive instance admin will crack down on your sub or remove you as a moderator for editorial reasons.
Reddit is pretty slimy, but for years they were broadly hands-off from a moderator perspective. Reddit’s recent actions show that a moderator can put decades of sweat equity into building and maintaining a community - and then get shut out capriciously, without communications channels or other tools to migrate any significant portion of that community. Start over from scratch.
The question for a prospective moderator is whether you can really trust the instance you’re basing your new mag on. Most communities of any size will want insurance of having an instance they control or at least an instance that makes fairly strong assurances about moderator ownership.
If you’re just driving by and you want to own the espresso machine universe on a particular instance, you can create /m/EspressoMachines and arbitrarily name a few other moderators and then wander off, but this kind of moderator is doing very little to grow or maintain the community. It’s arguably irrational to commit to that kind of labor when the rug is likely to be pulled out from under you at any time.
The differences among instances really do matter.
If Stormfront opens an instance tomorrow, would you say it makes no difference because they will all talk to each other anyway? You shouldn’t. The example of Mastodon shows they won’t all talk to each other, often for very good reasons. Like “that instance is literally Stormfront.” You can expect that instance to have Nazi moderation policies, to normalize Nazism and to engage in Nazi brigading.
Imagine an average Redditor lands on one of the main Lemmy instances, where everyone (on penalty of excommunication) holds that Stalin Did Nothing Wrong, that Ukrainian culture and language should be exterminated and submerged in the Russian Empire, and so on. If that Redditor doesn’t really understand that the instances are different in viewpoint and policy, they can reasonably conclude that the Fediverse is dominated by tankies. Meanwhile, despite their faults, Twitter and Reddit still exist and are not so clearly dominated by people who like to promote genocide. What does the average user think?
what you see as ads, they see as content.