All of these services are very new. Exactly what people want out of them — including what the people operating instances want out of them — is still being worked out.
This is not a commercial production service that you have a contract with. It's an experimental system run by volunteers who don't all have the same ideas in mind. People aren't just working out the kinks — the process of discovering what this is all really for is still ongoing.
To clarify a minor point, beehaw isn't new. It was established in Feb 2022, and it's been thriving with a relatively small community up until this months crazy growth. They're not so much finding their feet as trying to maintain an existing communities safety in the face of rapid growth.
Not at all. They've been one of the largest instances on lemmy for over a year, and they federated widely during that time. The issue is that lemmy is still a relatively immature platform in terms of moderation features. The workload on their moderators to sustain federation and community safety with rudimentary moderation tools whilst the threadiverse population increases in size over 1000 fold is incredibly high.
So until moderation tools improve, their options are
Give up their safety focus. We can assume that's not going to happen
Find more admins, which is easier said than done, because at this point in time, one of the lacking moderation features is the ability to add instance moderators. Right now, the only instance elevated role is admin. You have to be able to trust the new admin with the keys to everything.
Defederate with instances that threaten their high value on community safety
Everything you've said here though is very different to your previous comment about them not understanding federation.
This reply is closer to the truth. They understand it quite fine, but have different priorities, and those priorities probably weren't clear to a lot of their new members
It's the other way around: new people and instances are learning that federation also means that other servers don't want to federate with you, and that that's okay. This is different from the usual 'freeze peach' stuff, this is just communities saying 'we don't want to hear you'.