It is right now super frustrating to be in the situation I do not see vast amounts of the lemmyverse, because of it.
One of the reason I joined this is because the sharp blocking of NSFW content goes against my principles of sexpositivity and I don't believe a free community can exist without acknowledging that part of the user group. Nobody banned reddit for having gonewild, so what is going on here?
Afaik, lemmy.ml never gave a reason as to why they defederated with us. Which is obviously fair, they are their own instance, and can make that decision. However, it most likely has to do with their strict "no porn" rule, since if members want to upload or view content from lemmynsfw.com, their servers would have to handle that and a lot of instance admins don't like the thought of having to manage explicit/sensitive content like what we have.
That is a pretty big structural flaw of Lemmy as a whole then and is a stark contrast to reddit where mods of one sub never had to bother about what happens on other pages.
I don't think its a flaw at all. The decentralized nature allows users to make the decision on which instance to browse that meet all of their needs. There are instances out there that federate with both LemmyNSFW and Lemmy.ML. You could just browse those instances and still see the content you like seeing.
I think you'll find that the continued existence of /r/jailbait was a pretty large concern among the community for fear of reddit as a whole getting booted off the internet.
It's pretty awful for an average Lemmy user, because you can get cut off from communities you already subscribed to, without any notification! So you might post and comment without realizing that your content is not getting published, even though you and your local instance still see it.
The user experience would be improved by getting a warning if you try to contribute to a community in this case. And also your subscriptions should show warnings about not working anymore, and those should come up as notifications on the account.
So the way federation works, that just kinda naturally happens as nsfw instances are fine with each others' content and other instances aren't.
lemmynsfw isn't being blocked from all federation, it's just one big instance that won't federate with us. That means users on that instance won't see content from here, and that comments from accounts here won't make it to that instance.
Any other lemmy server, such as other nsfw instances, are perfectly able to federate with us.