Holy shit guys. If they wanted to have that requirement let them have it, if people wanted to fulfill it and join its good for them. If they wanted to defederate, thats ok too.
I'm still a little sad that both solarpunk and beehaw just straight up didn't respond to my essays back when there weren't that many lemmy instances yet.
The beauty of the fediverse. You have the choice of multiple projects and for each project many instances covering political, technical and other points of view. Each of those able to curate and moderate the experience to fit in with expectations.
If none of those suit you, you can make your own.
I totally understand what beehaw are trying to do. If there was no choice there might be a problem but, there is plenty of choice.
I literally told them I like their animal community and want to look at animals and mentioned how I feel about bunnies and that was that, I'm an official beehaw member who can look at animals whilst signed on to beehaw lol they're not for everyone and that's fine because they're not trying to be for everyone. If it does seem like a place you want to join they're not insane about sign up, just give them a good reason you want to be there besides like "trolling lolz".
If there is anything new for Lemmy as far as I have joined, it's always the heckin' instance wars, just pick one and be happy with it
Also, there are a lot of instances that require written stuff for joining as an extra filter to avoid bots and trolls ¯_(ツ)_/¯
I just browse their communities from another instance. It's not like you have to be a member to engage with a particular instance. It might harder to find an instance's community on your instance because nobody on your instance has subscribed to the community, kick-starting the feed to start populating with its content, but using the outside/3rd party instance/community search tools, I've subscribed to several communities across several instances, all from my preferred instance account.
The only benefit I could see to being specifically on Beehaw is that you would be somewhat shielded from content coming from instances they defederated with; and it's a big blanket ban. Maybe some of the communities on a blocked instance aren't piles of shit. I, personally, would rather start with an entirely open instance and block what I don't want to see myself, over letting someone else make that choice for me. There are very few instances I would block in their entirety so far that I've seen.