But bear in mind that this is just the knee-jerk reaction of the admins at Beehaw; they will likely defederate with any community that has open sign-ups.

Beehaw wants to promote a certain culture within their instance. That's well within their prerogative - but I think they're beginning to understand why the fediverse may not be the place to do such things.

The fediverse is designed to link instances with niche communities together. If I had an instance about model-making, there'd be communities for model trains and model rockets and dioramas and Warhammer blah blah blah. These would be a bunch of separate - but related - topics, held under one instance.

That's how the fediverse is designed to work. You have a bunch of people who share a specific interest on a "home" instance, and if they wish to talk about other things then they connect to other instances and grab communities to assemble their custom homepage. Great examples of this are lemmy.blahaj.zone (LGBTQ-focused instance), rblind.com (accessibility-focused instance), and even the much-maligned Lemmygrad (tankie instance).

You focus on the communities you want and block the ones you are opposed to. Each instance has a discrete subject matter and specialty. You could have an instance which only allows verified scientists and historians to replicate AskScience and AskHistorians, and people who are "verified" will have it as their home instance.

What has actually happened is people want to make Reddit 2. And this isn't the fault of the users; indeed, I'd say the fact that lemmy.ml exists as a dev-run general-purpose instance violates this very philosophy the fediverse has.

Beehaw wants to operate under the way the fediverse "should" work; i.e. Beehaw.org is a small community dedicated to a certain mission, with subjects that relate to that mission. The issue is that their mission is very close (but not quite) to being "be Reddit 2".

They want to have a tight-knit community where everyone knows each other and everyone can look at all sorts of content, with strict moderation to prevent the worst of social media showing up on a platform. They want to be a "hub" where people make a home, and their users would be able to dip in to more specific instances if they needed something.

The issue is that the fediverse is a two-way street. I think Beehaw is just now realizing that. They set themselves up as a "general instance" and found wild success. But the "tight-knit community" part is hard when any rando can make an account on another instance and talk to them.

I think Beehaw mostly wants it to be a one-way interaction - their users can participate in other instances, but outside users can't directly talk to their instance. That's the only reasonable way for them to accomplish their goals, but that's not how Lemmy really works, at least not right now.

Add to this that people are flooding in constantly. They want to be in "Reddit 2". The fediverse supports such things - lemmy.world, sh.itjust.works, fedia.io, kbin.social, etc. are all great examples - but that's not how it was designed to be used. Beehaw is an older community, one founded with thoughts of the "ideal" fediverse... but it's becoming obvious that (like Mastodon) users are going to gravitate towards the familiar and make everything general-purpose.