I personally find beehaw's moderation weird, I get that you're trying to create a safe and regulated space, but you simple can't do that with 4 mods on the entire instance.
I do think that their decision to jump to defederation is a result of these 4 people being overworked and simply not having the time to rationally evaluate the situation.
if they want to continue like this they'll have to evaluate on whether to appoint proper mods to their communities or just decide to change their stance on "safe" content.
Honestly, I respect their decision but at the same time I wonder why they didn't create a standalone unfederated from the get go.
If you want to keep the community small and tightly nit it's just not compatible with the federation system. Now people got invested in some beehaw communities only to end up disconnected from them.
Still, it's not like there is a guide for this. We are all learning how to make the federation work. I hope we can keep it civil toward instances that choose to defederate.
We are all invested in the same thing:
Making Lemmy successful.
Most of Beehaw's blocks are "generic ActivityPub assholes", which, before the Reddit migration, was really just the worst of the worst of Mastodon, Pleroma, Soapbox, and Miss/Calc/???Key instances, with the occasional PeerTube thrown in.
They likely just imported one of the common blocklists and moved on with their lives, which really should be "how to secure your community 101" but most Lemmy admins haven't seem to have gotten the memo yet.
I'm patiently waiting for the day those assholes realize most of Lemmy is open ground for them to shit in, boy that's gonna be a fun few days.