I actually started on Kbin.social, but then it got shut down, Kbin died and now fedia.io seems to be the largest one running MBin. I like the interface on MBin and I guess it’s good to have a diverse fediverse with different services, but at the same time, why use mbin when everyone congregates on lemmy instances? The local magazines on fedia are for the most part, quite dead, when compared to lemmy collections. In the end I feel like there aren’t enough people to go around to support many more services like MBin and Piefed.
While the political friction is very real, my perspective on the whole dynamic is that the anticipation of or focus on the friction is one of the biggest source of problems.
For instance, you cite beehaw and state that it’s the extreme leftist instances that are the most troublesome … when beehaw famously defederated from lemmy.world ages ago, as well as sh.itjust.works, while the admin of lemm.ee has said, controversially for some of their users I believe, that they don’t really understand all of the fuss over hexbear. Meanwhile, lemmy.ml tries to stay widely federated AFAICT, and from what I’ve gathered, the admins have even gotten in hot water with their lefty users for not defederating from more right-wing-ish instances earlier, and then are often criticised for their active moderation on their own instance.
Point being that it’s all probably a bit of a mess that doesn’t neatly align with left v right.
I’d bet that the biggest problems with the core devs approach to moderation tooling is that they have like making them and don’t like what they perceive to be a culture of demanding open source users (which I’ve come to understand over time actually).