There are a lot of tanky posts coming from lemmy.ml. Their whole purpose seems to be to troll and spread their bullshit far and wide. They are nearly as bad as the alt-right. They argue in bad faith and celebrate authoritarian oppression. The beehaw mods might want to consider defederating.
I’ve tried to recommend Beehaw to others, but I don’t think I’ve gotten a single bite. Because when they visit Beehaw, they also see content from the other parts of Lemmy – both posts and comments – that Beehaw still federates with, including .ml, and are turned off by a lot of it.
A big part of it is not understanding how the fediverse works, but that’s to be expected; it is confusing. But even having heard my explanation, they’re often still like, “Meh, I’ll just stick with reddit…” because, as you mentioned, first impressions are everything.