Lemmy is federated, but still, the instances with the most activity dominate people's feeds
Instances with funding sources will have the best hardware capable of supporting the largest communities, and will have the most activity, but then aren't people's feeds still influenced by capital, like with reddit, in the end?
If the content is low quality, other servers may choose to de-federate with them. And there is nothing forcing individual members to subscribe to the communities of those corporate instances.