to start: after some consideration, we've altered our entry question a little bit so that entry is not guaranteed. during the daytime you can basically expect waits of 30 minutes or less when it comes to approval/disapproval, but overnight it'll be anywhere from 6-12 hours. just FYI
if you'd like to introduce yourself without it getting lost in all the posts already made, i just made a thread for that over here
our sidebar should give you most of the information you're looking for about us, but to reiterate some: we are pretty relaxed here, but we have a well carved out understanding of what we want to be. if you would like more elaboration on that, you can find elaboration on that at length in the following two posts:
for some less lengthy and more relaxed elaboration, see the discussion in the comments of this post.
as for funding: we are 100% user-funded. if you would like to contribute to our ability to keep the website up, you can donate on OpenCollective, which supports both one-time donations or monthly donations.
a few other questions occasionally pop up like "why do we have the set of communities we do?" and "why can't people make their own?" (the latter is a feature of lemmy). for elaboration on that, you can see the following post and the discussions here. we are open to suggestions and creating communities as demand sees fit; see also discussion here.
downvotes are disabled on this instance and that's a thing we're not liable to change. if you'd like elaboration for why that is, see this comment. this may be a point of friction for some coming from reddit, but i hope you'll understand why we're doing it even if you don't necessarily agree with it.
if you're interested in our governance to this point and a brief idea of our long term goals, see the comment here.
feel free to sound off on other questions you have; i'll try to update the OP with those and our ability to answer them as time goes on.
You should be able to follow and comment on Midwest.Social communities from Beehaw. Open up your search menu in Beehaw and search !community@midwest.social to pull up a Beehaw link to a midwest community (replace the word "community" with the name of the group that you want to follow), from there you should be able to comment and subscribe from your Beehaw account.
I had to look up how to do this a little bit ago and this search format worked for subscribing to !geschichte@feddit.de, but I haven't tried commenting across servers yet.
Personally, I use my browser for accessing fediverse sites. I'm trying to get away from having to download separate apps to do every little thing. I wish more companies would focus on developing a good browser experience instead of shunting people into separate apps with all kinds of added permissions requests.