Freedoms were not limited. Any user can still go apply for a beehaw account if they want one. Any beehaw user can open an account on any other instance they want. People can still talk, people can still be heard.

No one is entitled to force others to listen to what they say. Beehaw's owner pays for their server. It's their own private instance. They can determine the rules that accounts that use or federate with their instance have to follow, and everyone has the freedom to associate with beehaw if they want.

Finally, beehaw isn't a government, taking an action to limit the freedoms of their citizens. In most modern, western societies, that is between governments and their people. In nearly every similar structure, those people do not have the same "rights" in regards to private businesses or private organizations.

Don't believe me? Go into a grocery store and start screaming obscenities at fellow customers and see how long it takes you to be forcibly removed and banned from the premises. And that won't be your freedoms being limited, either. It will be that private business deciding that you're not allowed to associate with them any longer.

This is no different. The people who run beehaw can choose how to run their space. It's their money they pay for the service with. We don't get to tell them how to spend it. Their users and donors have a say in it, and if their users and donors don't like how the operators respond to their expectations, then they won't have users and donors. That's for them to decide.

People act like they're entitled to an audience with beehaw users, and they simply aren't. It's that easy. You can't just go into your neighbor's house and demand they listen to what you have to say. They can, and will, boot your ass to the curb, or worse, as soon as they're tired of listening. I'm not sure why this is so hard for some people to understand.

They could also simply apply for an account on lemmy.world, if they wanted. I hear the bar is pretty low, and the users of beehaw were indirectly notified of this, too. And the inconvenience of having to create a second account is almost nonexistent.