How are "We" to place trust in the fediverse?

I came here for the same reasons as most of you and chiefly among them was to escape the corporate embrace of common social media platforms.

But how much trust can we place into Lemmy, Mastodon, and/or other various integrated Fediverse platform instances?

I'm all for open-source and transparency which the devs seem to provide, although providing source code and routinely audited source code are entirely different concepts.

Similarly, the high availability of source code may lead to malicious instances, actors, and/or back-end modifications that would favor specific instances resounding consequence throughout the Fediverse.

So I ask simply: How much faith do you have? (Please provide supporting documentation links supporting your answer because I'm genuinely interested.)

EDIT: I literally removed a semi-colon character ':'