That was not the case with lemmy. Most of the instances I tried required manual approval for signups. It took me going through like 4 different instances to find one that didn't.

To be fair, most people reccomend lemmy.world now, and that doesn't need manual approval. But there's another problem, they can't interact with Beehaw.

"Simply" picking an instance is not actually that simple. Most people just want to go to the site and sign up. Even with email, they know what Gmail and Outlook are. But on Lemmy, there's no indication of what you're supposed to pick. Even if you try to go with what seems like the "default" instance, lemmy.ml, you're met with an announcement saying not to do thaf cause it's overloaded.

People don't want to have to make decisions, especially when they don't have any information to go off of.