Instances have different purposes and for beehaw, maintaining community standards is more important to them then wider federation, they also explicitly said it was a bandwidth issue for their mod team, that as things settle and tools get better for modding within Lemmy itself they’ll reassess. I don’t find that particulary unusual but I’m also a Mastadon user and that’s very common over there
Exactly what I was thinking. For Lemmy being an alternative to Reddit, yet instances have closed registrations. That is a way to get people not to sign up.