@Wuzzy There's kbin (kbin.social for example) as a tankie free alternative, but it is even more alpha quality than Lemmy. The Kbin developer also already expressed interest in making a Lemmy to Kbin database migration script.

Personally I think with the current influx of people and developers the impact of having a tankie as one of the two main developers is probably going to get less over time and if things boil over the chance of a viable fork is much higher now.

It's not ideal, but as long as you don't join the instances directly controlled by the developers (which are overloaded or mostly blocked anyway), it is not such a big deal in the short term.