In the past week I caught a 7 day ban for "misinformation" (x3, then for reposting a link to the mod logs, "skirting the rules", "repeated offenses" etc.) from /c/WorldNews for accusing Democrats of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. An actual fact - tens of billions of dollars in arms sent to an ongoing genocide/ethnic cleansing by Biden. No problems like that on lemmy.ml. That really says it all for me. Lemmy's basically just a fediverse reddit, with the same mod structure - if mods abuse their power, and admins don't keep them in check, it's time to ditch the instance.
By the way, Lemmy itself was created by Dessalines, the admin of lemmy.ml. Who I collaborated with briefly on building some of the UI that you're using right now to read this. Very thorough guy.