I've been part of super-tight, highly curated communities before. They're nice in their own way and a fully different way of running a community than Reddit-style that most are used to.

I think for a lot of (former) Redditors, they come over here on Lemmy.world and see a tightly curated community like Beehaw.org and just get confused. Something like that was simply not possible in Reddit and runs counter to the way popular internet sites (not just Reddit, but Twitter, Facebook, etc. etc.) were run. But this is closer to the BBS days where recruitment was a phone-call and a secret code you found at the gym... back in those days, all communities were tightly curated and Reddit is the aberration.

In any case, Lemmy (and the Fediverse) allows the "freedom" group to interact with the "tight / curation" world, in a... tight controlled manner. Its alien, its unnatural to some, etc. etc. But hey, its Lemmy. That's how we're gonna roll.