Okay, I sent a join request. You may get a couple from me, Pax, as the link you provided was for the mobile site, which I don't use (I'm on a laptop), so when I went to it and clicked on "join", I got no acknowledgement that a request to join had gone through. Once I went to the non-mobile site (i.e., remove the "m" before facebook.com in the URL), I could see that I was in a pending status.

I hope this forum is around for a good long time, but it's good to have an alternative just in case!