If this is anything like the mastodon.social debacle, things will probably settle down eventually. Moderation tools will be built, the more moderators will compensate for the explosive growth, and in time federation will probably happen again. It’s a real shame, but with 22k users moderated by 4 admins just isn’t going to prevent toxicity and abuse from spreading.

I also think things would significantly improve if users were able to block whole instances (say, lemmygrad, exploding-heads, etc.) instead of having to rely on moderators to take full defederation action.

The defederation risk is one of the reasons I’ve chosen to host my own instance (though that means I’ll never make it into the whitelist-only federated lemmies). I can hardly disagree with the Beehaw admins at this stage, but it’s still a shame to see it happen.