Then I picked beehaw, because most of the communities I wanted to join were there. The signup form turned out to be an application form. I spent about an hour mulling over what to write there.

Bro this is a skill issue

I'd just like to say sorry for the experience you've had with Beehaw, we're trying our best at the moment to get through everyone but it's been a really hard time.. We think we might be able to reach 0 people left in our queue by the end of tomorrow (optimistically, there's about 2k left)

All of this is fairly reasonable for the kind of project it is. Sounds like you and those users don't understand what signing up at any site really means and you've been so separated by the front end, you be have no ability to show grace when basically using a website for free hosted and manages by free people what takes money donated by others?

Why is this anyone else's fault but you? You've gotten spoiled. Maybe everything isn't for you if you cannot even do the bare minimum to participate?

It was not difficult for me to sign up. I had to give some moments of thought to each step except the form application which I gave a couple moments of thought. I was kind of glad it wasn't instant-simple because I'd prefer thinking people be here.

That prolly sounds smackish but it's just my directness. I really didn't have any problems.

My experience signing up involved no pain at all and I personally liked having my application screened. I had access within an hour or two, it wasn't a complicated process and I chose beehaw because of it's community

It seems pretty easy to understand signing up, from my perspective. The hard part is understanding how everything is connected

not enough people here? lemmy instances total are close to a million and that isn't even including kbin users

also, what you said about the sign up process is entirely because of the influx of new users right now - of course its not good UX but with the community beehaw wants to foster, they need that application and they're 4 people accepting all of them!

be reasonable and accept that this site is young! it has not had the decade of development that reddit has behind it! things are weird and still broken and that is okay, the community adapts to its quirks

You picked one of the worst instances to sign up with. Not all of them use the application process, many are just captcha plus email. Then Beehaw is failing to send confirmation emails.

The sign up process has to incorporate security to protect the Lemmy federation from spambots and other exploitation. Yeah it's a hassle, but it's not there to annoy people, rather to provide the best possible user experience. But still an application is something that can dissuade a potential user. That's why many don't use one.

Beehaw is one of the most heavily laden instances probably second only to the originating lemmy.ml instance. An overloaded instance can result in hangs and sluggish performance. Also true for one with high latency such as one located overseas.

It's true the chore of finding a good instance can dissuade some people. If you don't know any better and sign up on a bad instance it can unfairly soil your opinion of the whole Lemmy federation.

Once you find an instance you like (good ping, good performance, good admin) all the content across all the instances is there, barring any defederation. Which communities are local to the instance is not normally a selection criteria.