There are different opinions on Beehaw’s registration process. I kind of see how some people would find it dissuasive, specially after most of us are coming from Reddit. But I still think it’s very practical, at least for the time being.
Btw, this is only my opinion as a new user, I don’t know any of the admins/mods. Link to my original comment.
You mentioned wanting a programming centric account, so programming.dev makes sense. They don’t allow open creation of communities. They must be requested, they must be tech related (don’t know if this might change). They seem to want to keep the discussions on tech and programming.
discuss.online’s admin is working on creating some moderation tools for Lemmy admins. I’ve been chatting with him on the discuss.online Matrix server. He seems like someone that will build a good community.
Their moderation ethos are not hashed out like Beehaw, but they have both started up this month and I like the vibes so far.
If those don’t work out, I’m also starting up an instance that will be up and running soon at grok.town with an ethos that largely overlaps with Beehaw. But at the moment I only have a matrix space set up at https://matrix.to/#/#groktown:matrix.org