This idea is pretty cool, i hope they will succeed to achieve that. Imo, we lack diversity on the forumverse except maybe mastodon.
It would provide an additional security layer, another governance. They could also benefit a lot from local community and can check vote, email, ip...Other have already mentionned good example with blahaj, beehaw...
On the other hand, it will render the instance more visible.
On my main instance, jlai.lu, i think we don't manage well sexist speech. They are moderated, we do our best to explain to our users what's wrong and slowly change them but we don't have the same sensibility as women.
Men explaining women...So we probably missed lot things.