basic community approach
I think that lemmy is basically a place where people who have the same interests come together. These commonalities are organized through communities. This ensures that anyone who wants to contribute something to the topic can join them. **But at the same time, and more importantly for me, it also means I can stay away from a topic if I don't like the topic. **
My derivation from it
The platform with a focus on #nsfw is a place where basically everyone can organize their topics in communities. It's an open, liberal place, a place of freedom of expression. Everyone can communicate their views.
But, and this is a very important but for me!: The platform and the operators have a social responsibility. They face this by setting rules according to which certain content is not desired on the platform. For me, the most important principle is legality. I as a person, and probably others feel the same way, do not want to be on a platform that publishes or tolerates prohibited / illegal / borderline content. Banning these topics is an effective technique, although it may require community involvement to bring such content to attention. I would therefore find it wrong to say that the operator alone is responsible.
Don't ban at any cost
The thin red line between bans to keep the community "clean" and to prevent freedom of expression is a challenge in many topics. For me personally, there are several "lines" that I use as a guide. The absolute line is what is illegal by law. Based on this, I sort out what is not of interest to me because I don't want to deal with the topic / I don't like it. At the same time, I think that the community concept creates a solution in which people with any #nsfw interests can get together without it affecting me in any way. No matter how kinky one finds it, another may find finding like-minded people in a niche particularly helpful.
personal opinion
So I don't think that legal content should be banned in principle. But I think it's useful to give the user the ability to personally filter out unwanted content. (I really appreciate the Mastodon concept, which allows me to hide certain terms or tags in the settings, and I use it intensively.) So far, I've managed with lemmy in such a way that my feed only shows the subscribed communities. That's why I haven't needed the function to hide entire communities yet. But I assume that the day will come and as a user I don't think it's a bad thing at all to actively take care of myself that I don't see things that I personally don't find beautiful. It's my responsibility to do that and I think it's the right thing to do.
no matter what #nsfw inclinations
I intentionally didn't address #scat in writing the post itself beacuse it is less important to me than how we want to deal with content in general. Personally, I'm not a fan of scat, but that doesn't mean I don't feel concerned with the question. Because it could be that tomorrow there will be a vote on another #nsfw niche topic which I really love. That's why I'm looking for a solution that restricts the lemmynsfw as little as possible and still ensures that it remains a place for everyone.