From a purely operational standpoint, rapid growth stresses a network service not only in its technical capacity, but also in the ability of the service's operators to keep up with fighting fires. Engineering capacity to work on a service is itself a limiting factor on healthy growth.

If the tools aren't yet there to mitigate a rapid growth in abuse problems, then it just makes sense for them to limit their exposure to the rapid-growth part of the network. It takes time to write those tools.

The main issue with an instance such as lemmy.world is that they don't vet people at all. Beehawk manually approves their users, but that becomes kinda pointless when anyone can just create an account on lemmy.world and then go post on beehawk.

I disagree with that assessment, and it doesn't match with what they said in the post. 4 bullets justified the decision, all of which outlined philosophical differences to my eyes.

It's true that in the future, they may have sufficient mod tools/capacity to overcome these philosophical differences with brute force. But at minimum, it is a union of both practical ability and philosophical differences that led to this decision and that is totally in line with the decentralized nature of the fediverse.

I don't know if it was the right decision for them. Time will tell. But being able to make those decisions on their own judgment is crucial to the longterm health of the system. We're two outsiders to Beehaw. I can't speak for you, but personally, I chose not to register at Beehaw because I didn't like the sound of a more curated safe space. I also chose not to register at Lemmy.world, because there are things about it that rubbed me the wrong way, too. That's a crucial part of how the fediverse is supposed to work.