I feel like a lot of people coming over here from reddit (granted I'm one of them) don't really understand what federation is. The admin (the peeps actually hosting and running the instance) can do whatever they want. And unlike reddit, if you disagree with them you can just move to another instance. As I understand it (and they posted a large thread explaining all this) Beehaw wants to keep their community small and regulated, and with the massive growth of other instances like ours coming in they felt overwhelmed. It's totally understandable and we shouldn't be dicks about it