I was strictly replying to the part of your comment where you said they made a decision to try to be one of the largest instances – imo they did not make a explicit decision to try to be that, but rather the growth was a side effect of the circumstances around reddit users checking out the fediverse.
Is closing registrations is better than having an application with questions that weed out low-effort users? IMO it’s probably a wash. beehaw has only banned one user from the local instance that I know of, so the application process seems to be working overall. The issue is that other instances are growing too quickly and needing to moderate those users, not their own.
I do agree this isn’t great for the threadiverse and I wish it hadn’t come to this, both on a personal and community level. I was subbed to the knitting community on lemmy.world, it was the most active of those communities that I saw, and now I’m locked out. Idk if I want to move to an alt on a different instance, or self-host my own so that I’m fully in control of what I can see, or what. :S
Yeah, it seems likely to me that humans as a species will survive through the various climate crises, but I think the question is - at what cost? A lot of the scientific research and tech developments that might help us cope with or reduce the impact of climate change seem pretty reliant on our global system of trade / supply chain, and COVID showed how fragile that system is. I worry that by the time it gets bad enough that everyone is on board with doing what we can to reduce our impact, it’ll be too late because the systems that could create those new options will not be capable of operating at the level we assume is normal today.