The whole system is built on anarchist principles of self-determination and freedom of association. You don't have to trust any centralized authority. You control your list and which instances' lists you trust.
I don't control any master list. I just run the DB. All the connections are set by the people using it. It also has a REST API so you can interact with it programmatically to build new tools and automation. For example we already use it to quickly block CSAM and lolicon instances.