Beehaw markets themselves as a heavily moderated space and they caught a lot of flack for defederating from Lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, but even they are still federated with a bunch of different instances. There will probably be a pool of instances that share a fairly hands-off approach and remain connected to all the other instances that have a “we’ll federate with anyone” policy. There will likely be a collection of middle-ground instances who defederate with instances that are the source a lot of harassment or certain NSFW material but otherwise don’t restrict much and still federate with instances that maintain similar moderation styles. At the far end you end up with places like Gab and Truth Social which are both Mastodon instances that aren’t federated at all and are completely closed communities because they only ever wanted to be an echo chamber. The rest of the fediverse or even just Mastodon didn’t cease to exist when Truth Social started up its own walled off instance.
People can self select into the kinds of communities they like. The unrestricted ones will only fail if the lack of moderation is such a problem that nobody signs up to any of them.
Kbin does a better job of putting new posts in front of you even before you have subscribed to anything, so I think it is easier to find interesting things to read. Kbin is newer than Lemmy, so Lemmy had the advantage in familiarity for people. More people had heard of it when Reddit’s API drama blew up and that gave Lemmy a distinct advantage when people picked a new platform. Kbin also has some annoyances like not being able to collapse comments and vote buttons being at the top instead of the bottom of posts and comments. If someone has written a lengthy comment, I want to read through the whole thing before I decide how to vote and I don’t want to scroll back up to get to a vote button. To reply to a post you also have to scroll through the comment section. In some cases it’s good to see if someone else has already said what you are going to say, but in other cases if someone is looking for personal stories, you don’t necessarily need to read everyone else’s story before submitting your own.
Personally I have this kbin account and a lemmy account as well. My Lemmy server seems to go down more often and the default sort always shows the same days old pinned posts from my server admin that I can’t seem to hide after reading. On Reddit, I didn’t have to switch sort to see newer stuff so Lemmy comes across as pretty stale sometimes even though there is a fair amount of posting going on.