That dead woman called Tumblr is still walking with a healthy strut these days, also soaking up some displaced Redditors. Horny shit is slowly but surely returning to Tumblr’s fields, as well.
Tumblr illustrates the problem with porn in general, they didn’t shut it down for no reason, they shut it down because the pedos had decided to use it as a dissemination portal for their vile shit, and the structure of Tumblr made it difficult to moderate away, especially at scale. Thus, Apple threatening to pull them from the app store, for good reason. All they could do was go scorched earth on porno.
So that’s the issue we’re going to have, here, and I’m not sure if the “some guy running an instance for the fuck of it” model is prepared for it.
The key difference with lemmy is, if that one instance is the one disseminating cp, they get defederated, and so removed from the other normal users, and then if the instance doesn’t shut down, LEO gets involved. The other normal porn-hosting instances can operate business as usual.
Law enforcement would probably shut down such instances faster than the rest of Lemmy could collectively defederate them.
Hosting such stuff on the clear web is basically asking for a joint FBI, NCA and other major law enforcement agency raid on your premises.
The piratebay has been running since 2003 - 2023 on the clear web. Thats how hard it is to take down a website when done properly. With the few times its been down and/or raided thats still 99.99% uptime.