His main complaints are valid about them being locked down, which i also understand due to server bandwidth. But it does feel dickish. Just redirect the signups to the instances page.

If the people running a server want to vet people that’s upto them they pay the bills? I remember some mastodon servers used to do the same.

It’s great to see more Lemmy/Kbin instances being stood up despite what some moaning Micheal might think of the platform.