IMO moderation necessarily has to exist two places in a federated environement. Yes, the community (hosting instance) always has to do moderation, but so does the federating instance. If the federating instance does not have policies in place to handle bad actors who go to other servers and break their rules and it is a large enough problem this action could make sense even well into the future. Unfortunately Lemmy is in a quite early state so I don’t think the tooling to do such work well even really exists. Something like only allowing confirmed posters from federated instancea or requiring someone to be subscribed for an amount of time before posting could do wonders. Yes, this is the nuclear option, but their choices at the moment are a butter knife or a nuke.

I sincerely hope this gets better as Lemmy matures.

Mastodon had similar conflicts between free speech absolutist servers and servers who wanted a hate/bigotry/pedo/whatever free experience.