Here and Beehaw seem like good instances. The drawback with Beehaw is that you can't create communities there. I don't know enough about the smaller instances to comment on it. That said, if you want to self-host and have the means, why not? What better way to make sure it's done right than to do it yourself?

Is my belief compatible with this instance or should I think about self hosting?

Yes, your belief is definitely compatible! What bugs me about lemmy.ml is that the moderation practices are not always clear, and the admins' political leanings show. Unlike Beehaw, I haven't had a manifesto or a grand vision of Sopuli. There are however principles for moderation that have formed: the scientific method and people behaving like in a furnished space. We are not free speech absolutists either, because Voat and currently Twitter have embodied where that leads.

This is all very concerning. I didn't leave uber-capitalist reddit just to end up at the other extreme. Maybe Lemmy's devs shouldn't also be running its de-facto main instance, and perhaps that same instance shouldn't be so politicized.

This is why I first opted for KBin instead of Lemmy for my own instance, as the admins of lemmy.ml are also the lead developers of Lemmy. It just felt unethical.

I didn't like KBin and ended up with Lemmy anway, as FOSS software like this isn't really political, as it can be forked, if necessary.

I'm still against ideology like that and I will remove the heart shaped donation icon from the top bar of my instance soon, so that the devs will not make any money from my instance.