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.