Fair point about the ActivityPub protocol being an entirely different set of developers yet still the "Lemmy" software that you are currently using - both the backend Lemmy implementation of ActivityPub and also the web UI (unless you are using an alternate approach via an app, in which case that brings up a third in the API for Lemmy) - owes its ownership entirely to the same team that also administers the Lemmy.ML instance.

Yes, some instances are problematic, yes, some devs might have had problematic views

And the above quote I presumed to refer to lemmy.ml (and others like lemmygrad.ml and hexbear.net; though that is only the beginning of what some people might consider "problematic" e.g. beehaw has defederated from lemmy.world, and the midwest.social admin has been caught banning people merely for downvoting their comment), since I recalled several discussions on Reddit (before the Rexodus) about the "problematic devs" which referred to the "tankie admins" on lemmy.ml (and worse yet lemmygrad.ml). Ofc there were other issues with other instances such as exploding-heads, but that would not seem to intersect at all with the "devs".

But yeah there could be problematic Mbin instances too? Though I don't recall ever hearing any discussions of those.

And similarly with PieFed, or Sublinks.

Speaking of, several places have announced wanting to switch from Lemmy to Sublinks when it becomes available, due to the back-end compatibility that is expected to have, when/if-ever it is released (January was some kind of a target date at some point iirc?). That includes Tesseract on dubvee.org, beehaw, and even Lemmy.World.

In the meantime, I have not heard any updates about Sublinks for almost half a year now, though PieFed is entirely functional today - e.g. I am speaking to you from it now. Though it's not terribly polished, e.g. I can no longer see your user- or instance name due to the way that comment replies are handled, nor any of the background context except your last reply to me and the OP, and quite often upvotes do not show in the proper color so I end up hitting it multiple times (upvote, oops the number went down, I must have already done it previously even though it wasn't showing in the green indicator color, so hit upvote again, then repeat the next time again, and/or with other comments as well). Though it has some REALLY nice moderation enhancement abilities - caveat: I am not a mod so haven't seen the actual tools, or even know if such exist. Nonetheless it is exciting to see those developments that have happened already:-).