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.
They had a bug where if you were denied it was supposed to send a notification with a link allowing you to elaborate, but those notices didn't go out. Then, when you've applied but gotten stuck in the unapproved state, your user account exists but is disabled, this you can't make a new account with that same name. Sort of a sucky situation all around.