I've read every scrap of documentation on their website, and still don't have a good sense what exactly their "values" are. In one sentence they sound more woke than Reddit, in the next sentence they sound like they're pushing back on overwrought codes of conduct.

Honestly, Beehaw just comes across as one quirky individual's vanity project, created out of spite after he got modded on another board, and it somehow stumbled into drawing a crowd.

'Tis the reason why they should not consider refederating. Having their own sets of accounts and some strict and underwhelmed modding is sufficient for their purpose of cultivating their safe space. Maybe others won't agree with their methods, but their purpose demands these methods in their space

Beehaw is still federated with most servers, they're not isolated. There are a few that are defederated from for differences like allowing hate speech, but the two big ones were to ease up the moderation demands as they had open sign ups without captcha from what I recall. They were the source of a lot of spam and making moderation a headache. The admins plan to revisit the issue if better mod tools are developed, it's still a young platform and better tools could make it easier to moderate without cutting off whole servers.