From the get-go, I’ve been saying the biggest issue with Lemmy as a decentralized platform is there will be no standard of openes or fairness to which all the admins and mods will be held to.
All of the fediverse is meant to coalesce together, but that could only happen so long as the people in charge permitted it. As usual, the technology is sound, but the human element was not taken into account.
With admins and mods on Lemmy doing whatever and shadow banning/defederating to curate how they believe their instance should be (instead of leaving that up to the users), it will be impossible for Lemmy to coalesce. Fediverse will have the illusion of a massive interconnected social network, but in reality it will be a fractured hodgepodge of fiefdoms under the rule of admins using the tools available to them to filter out any and everything, including the very votes the platform is meant to operate on.
Reddit had plenty of problems with extreme or biased moderation, but the centralized nature at least forced them to operate in the same space, where you either deleted shit or you didn’t. Everyone was in the shared version of the same shared site. With fediverse, moderation will be able to fracture that shared reality. The result will be confusion and a platform where visitors will not be seeing the same things to spite looking at the same social network, dependant entirely on the url in their task bar.