That's the trouble with bringing federated service to normal people, except for maybe email they all equate 1 app/website to 1 owner/company. With Lemmy.ml being the default (they're the people who maintain Lemmy, after all) and being quite ban-happy and perhaps even propagandistic, I bet a large amount of would-be Lemmy users get turned off pretty quickly. Probably also doesn't help that some people will tell people "it doesn't matter, just pick any random server" when it comes to getting people over their reservations regarding federated services. They might up thinking that criticising China is banned all across the Lemmyverse.
Apparently according to another user it just became open source.
I assumed it wasn't because there was no mention of it on their website+it being on Google Play (not really a condemnation but most Open source software is GitHub first).