Pretty cheap if your personal server is just for you... And even if you want to add a few friends & family. I plan on starting my own instance next month.

Mine was the same. I am generally a nice person, I just want a nice place to comment to people, talk about gaming, cars/motorcycles, animals and technology but I wasn't good enough somehow. I literally wrote a paragraph. No idea what I had to say to get in.

I'm just a derpysmilingcat, I'm not evil lol

IDK, I don't feel like I had to say that much to get in with my alt. I just wrote about how I liked having some more heavily moderated spaces to discuss sensitive topics. I even mentioned that I planned to maintain an alt to access less moderated spaces, just that I also intended to respect the culture and the vibe of Beehaw when interacting there.

I signed up and my blurb was very short and basically said that I like bunnies and they have some nice looking communities including one about pets. Got approved. It was basically what I just wrote so I don't know why others are being declined.

That would depend if you think lolicon or hentai of canonically underage characters in general is CP or not.
Doesn't matter in the case of Beehaw though because they defederate from any instance that allows pornographic NSFW content of any kind period - as do probably a majority of instances, at least until Lemmy creates better filtering systems.

Indeed. Hence, no one was all that bothered by the defederation from a large list of small instances with problem material. The question is "why is the number so high" and that's a large part of it

Eh, lemmynsfw.com has a similar sign up for. The difference is that they accepted the reason "this is my porn account"

Honestly you could say because you like to talk about tacos and it would get approved most of the time. We have that turned on because otherwise we'll get 60k spam users overnight. Email verification costs money especially if you're being spammed with 60k requests and the statement box stops all of it.

Thank you for clearing that up. I feel like I've heard both yes and no to this question. Still learning everything so it's hard to recall what was correct. Also just want to say how cool it is that people don't make you feel dumb for being wrong here. That's one thing I will not miss about Reddit.

My understanding is that we cannot. I've seen people talking about it maybe becoming a thing in the future, but right now the only option is to just go register your name on another instance. Alternatively, I guess you can host your own instance with just you (or a few friends I guess) and then you control what gets federated, but for me that seems like a little too much work right now. I may consider that in the future if I had more free time.

Not yet, but is planned: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/1985