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You're thinking about this purely from the standpoint of stopping spammers/bad actors, where as I'm trying to approach this from the standpoint of a well meaning user just trying to follow the rules. The current system does stop people from intentionally abusing the system, but it ironically can lead to people unintentionally abusing it. E.G. say I as a "normal" user with no knowledge at all of how the federation is actually implemented (not too far from the truth) decide to post into a community whose content violates the rules of my home instance (but not the instance the community is hosted out of). I would (incorrectly it seems) assume that as long as I was abiding by the rules of the community I'm posting in, that I'd have no problems, however doing so could see my account banned from my home instance.
In our theoretical example of a lemmy server run by PornHub, if I as a user of lemmy.ml want to post contents to a community hosted on PornHubs server I feel like I probably can't as lemmy.ml, for reasons of moderation I assume, has a site wide rule against pornographic content. If I did reasonably post in good faith believing that the community rules took precedent I would likely end up in trouble with the admins of lemmy.ml. In order to avoid this situation I feel like I'd need to make an account on the PornHub instance and treat that as my main account. That feels backwards to me.
I can see where you're coming from, but while the current solution makes things easy for the admins and moderators, I think it's going to lead to a lot of confusion when/if lemmy instances that allow porn actually start showing up (I'm not aware of a single one yet). There's also the question of text content that violates rules. If I post text content into a community in another instance that's allowed by the rules of that community, but somehow violates the site wide rules of my home instance where does that end up? Does my home instance even know about it? It's not stored locally I don't believe. I presume the only way they'd become aware is if the admin/mod of the community being posted into complained.
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Yeah, I'm not sure there's a good answer to be found here, but clearer messaging about exactly what the rules mean would help avoid confusion.
I took "no NSFW content" to mean no creating NSFW communities or posting NSFW content to any of the communities hosted there, but I had not assumed it would mean no subscribing to NSFW communities on other instances, or posting to NSFW communities on other instances. Understanding now the way that embedded media works though I'd now assume you could probably subscribe to NSFW communities on other instances, but not post to them.
Personally I have no problem with NSFW content, so I kind of regret signing up on lemmy.ml, but on the other hand there are no lemmy instances that currently allow NSFW content that I could sign up with, and there definitely weren't any 2 years ago when I created this account.
As for self hosting, while I do have the knowledge to do so, it's a question of motivation and priorities. I simply don't want the headache of running a server, I'm annoyed enough as it is just keeping my home systems patched and up to date. I used to run some servers for other things, but after not even logging into one for nearly a year (yes, that's terrible and very risky) I decided to retire them.
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I had considered setting up an account on beehaw, but the no downvotes thing really bothers me. Plus it still has the no NSFW problem. There's only a couple people I've seen so far on lemmy.ml that post Russian and Chinese propaganda that I've had to block, but I also understand that they aren't technically violating the rules of the server so there's nothing the admins can (or should) do in those cases. I'm a strong believer in freedom of speech so I'm against censorship in general however I also feel that the corollary to that is that nobody should be subjected to something without their consent. If it becomes more of a problem I might look for a different server, but unfortunately lemmy.ml is one of the biggest instances so many of the communities I'm interested in are based out of it. Even if I registered elsewhere I think I'd still end up subscribed to several of its communities.
Longer term, I feel as if the federation model of lemmy is slightly misaligned. Like the communities and users should be more decoupled or something. I don't know, don't have a good solution, just a general feeling like all the pieces don't quite fit together right currently, but they're close.
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Just chiming in to thank both of you for that interesting discussion