That was a year ago, the fediverse was (and is) growing by leaps and bounds; basically all instances were dealing with DDoSes and huge waves of obviously scripted account-creation. AFAIK beehaw federates with both of those instances again.

I’m pretty ambivalent about federation. If an instance wants to be a private forum and not federate that’s up to them and a valid use case I guess. I personally prefer instances that federate with basically everyone and let me block per user/instance myself but to each their own.