I really don't see it in such a negative way. Being able to control what you allow and don't allow seems like the whole idea of a federated system in my perspective, including defederation with other instances.

Everything is also new to everybody and these are also just some volumteers sharing their servers and bandwidth to host a place for people to chill. Finding a way to moderate the huge influx of people sounds like a challenge and I can see why they would make this choice (and I believe it's temporary for now as well). I see Beehaw currently more like a phpbb forum that has it's own thing. So far I'm liking the different communities beehaw, lemmy.world and kbin bring, each in their own way.

I think so, but I;m not sure. Could also be the other way around. I'm still new to this as well.

Only from lemmy.world and sh.itjust.works, not with others AFAIK. The anouncementpost can be found here https://beehaw.org/post/567170