If they came out of nowhere with a pre-packaged, all finished closed-source product I’d be worried.

I mean... I agree with this, and I am worried, for this exact reason, even though Lemmy is open source. (1) The Chinese government has an extensive and successful history of inserting spyware into software that's in widespread use in the West (2) I can say based on some very preliminary tinkering with my own Lemmy instance that some of the security philosophy behind Lemmy is, at the very least, pretty questionable.

Tiktok was, and still is, extremely effective Chinese spyware. The CCP's tech operation is obviously capable. It's easily plausible to me that they could recognize the potential and power of federated networks as a new place for people to communicate and organize (outside China, and with some cleverness and courage, maybe inside it as well). If I were them I'd want to get out ahead of that. In fact I'd go so far as to say that it'd be surprising if they were unaware of ActivityPub and I'd bet that are keeping a close eye on developments and strategizing how to deal with it.

I mean... it seems unlikely to me that the Lemmy devs would be secretly employed by the Chinese government and also openly spouting pro-Communist propaganda. That seems just sort of bizarre and not a clever way to do it. But, the bottom line to me is if (1) the Chinese government is invested in spying on and controlling federated networks to the best extent they can (2) the main Lemmy devs are aggressively and openly pro-CCP, then that adds up to (3) time to rethink the idea of using Lemmy in the first place.

Are the Lemmy devs specifically pro-CCP? Not just Marxists, but specifically in favor of the details and actions of the modern Chinese government? I don't think Marx would like the CCP very much.