New to Lemmy

Honestly, most of them are pretty transparent. It isn't necessarily stickied and at the top of every page, but all of the bigger ones have some degree of public disclosure of the basics. Sh.itjust.works in particular had a primary admin that's very open about pretty much everything.

.ml, despite having other issues, is fairly open about their hosting.

Which, since the lemmy developers run that specific instance, leads into your new question.

The developers have no more control or influence on what instances do than any random instance does on another. The worst they could do is stop developing the project. At that point, it would be likely that someone would fork it and lemmy as a whole would move on. I know that there's a handful of people that have a plan in place for that should the devs give up, or take the project in a direction that would be harmful to the rest of lemmy.

That's a big benefit of the fediverse in general, it's open source. Even if the devs wanted to play silly buggers, it would get spotted pretty quick by the folks that have skill in that area, and lemmy in specific runs high to the kind of folks that do review code.

And, tbh, while I've had the occasional political disagreement with the devs (the main one, really), they've always given solid indication of practicing what they preach regarding lemmy. I've never seen them try anything to use their position as developers to muscle any instances at all, nor users on other instances.

Hell, I've had strong disagreements with dessalines on .ml, and never gotten a permanent ban. The only ban I ever got there was temporary, from a single community, and was deserved as I did break community rules. So, I don't necessarily like the devs, and I definitely don't agree with aspects of their political views, but they really haven't shown any desire or intent to use lemmy shadily.