The two biggest contributors to the original lemmy code are pro china and pro russia respectively. No one is sure how strong their opinions are, but there is a lot of fear mongering because their PFPs on GitHub are political. They created the first instance, lemmy, and the second, lemmygrad, using the same ip address.

Now, there's two important things to keep in mind. Lemmygrad, which is a "tankie" (highly political) group, is set up separately from the main lemmy group. Not only does this keep lemmy from being highly political, it also allows all other groups to defederate from lemmygrad while staying connected to lemmy. Most groups have lemmygrad defederated by default.

In my opinion, this is the right way to do things and there's nothing to worry about. But there are some people who think that since the creators are pro china and russia that it could be an attempt to "poison the well" of federation from the beginning. It comes from a biased belief that anything to do with the red scare is bad by default. The creators are not funneling money into political campaigns. They're not asking everyone to agree with their beliefs or pushing their opinions in non political groups. They're not able to remove communities that disagree with their philosophies.

Lemmy's code is open source and it is easy for moderators to block political content if they choose. There's going to be people with differing opinions. People who are socialist, or conservative, or anarchist are capable of creating good things. Plenty of people still buy from chick fil a or nestle even if they disagree with the group's politics. As of now there is no issue. However, reddit refugees are currently sensitive to a) preexisting problems from reddit that could carry over into fediverse and b) leaders disagreeing with their beliefs.

TL;DR: it's something that could potentially be a concern in the future, but isn't a problem right now. With new users on edge it's likely being blown way out of proportion.

I honestly don't care about the political views of the administrators as long as they keep moderation politically unslanted. The second they add in politics like Reddit did, I'm gone again. Real freedom of expression is allowing everybody to have their opinion. As a writer I know that freedom of expression is one of the few things that make life worth living.

That's why I got my own domain in the end, because I was tired of social media censoring me.

Tough one, maybe I am oversimplifying it but I'll try:

They hold personal beliefs that differ from other communities, and people are worried that they will promote those beliefs on the products/communities that they are involved in.

I don't know much about the devs, but honestly it doesn't matter. The devs could be nazis for all I care, the code is what matters. The code is open source, so you can see any malicious codes if they tried to inject any. Evil people sometimes make great things. Hitler has a few piece of decent (keyword: decent, not great by any meaningful standards) art, even tho he was a genocidal piece of trash. Just because you appreciate the art, doesn't mean you support nazism. (The analogy is a bit extreme but you get the point.)

The most prominent extrimist community, lemmygrad.ml has been defederated by most big instances. Any instance that is considered unacceptable can be defederated at any time by the instance admin. Lemmy does not currently have a extremist issue.

There's no lemmy admin, there's only admins for lemmy instances. Some instances like lemmygrad are far left and literal communists, while I'm sure there's already some popping up that have nazi sympathizers.

Part of being a federated service means anyone can start up their own instances. The only thing that can be done is blocking problematic instances.