Historically, porn has organically decided which platform or formats become dominant. It's incredibly anti-censorship, but walks many fine lines.
As Reddit now and tomorrow reveals more weaknesses, where will the OnlyFans creators, porn posters, and all those grassroots porn communities go? The creators need to make money by showing to a large and interested user base. The users need lots of content to choose from and be fed constantly, with very few hindrances between them and their...goals. Many of the niches actually have respectful and healthy communities, too. Those people deserve an easy to use platform, just as much as people that want to look at cats, some of those groups, arguably more.
The thought of how to pose this to the Fediverse, now, has been on my mind for weeks:
Can the fediverse rise to the task? Does it even want to? Should it?
Personally, I think it should absolutely try, but I'm not sure it can do so without several deep strides in tech and development. I'm aware this is a hot af take, but it's undeniable that the internet IS for porn, and denying that would be a huge opportunity loss for inevitably winning this popularity context.
Porn is great. As long as everyone depicted is an adult and consenting to what is happening. Recently PornHub did a massive purge of videos because there was revenge porn and worse on the platform and filtering through all of it is difficult so they nuked a bunch of it. The fediverse, right now, is somewhat the wild west. Here on Lemmy the Shit instance had to defederate from a porn instance due to content illegal in Canada (where the Dude who runs it is based). The ability for anyone to spin up an instance/(whatever it is on kbin) means this is already an issue. I could see a mostly clean split with a 'dark fediverse' of instances that are blocked by everyone but each other, but I think it has to be an extremely clean split for content creators to feel comfortable here. Because reputation is important for both the creators and the fediverse. And the fact is the fediverse may have already lost because if you have to explain the fediverse in order to answer "Does the fediverse have [awful shit]?" it's a big problem.