Not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of new users to the fediverse.
Yeah, and it started sucking when it added more users.
Hopefully in 10 years, the moderation tools will be good enough to deal with a scaling userbase. What the fediverse needs is moderation subscriptions i.e subscribing to or unsubscribing from moderation actions of different groups or people.
For example, joining a community would subscribe you automatically to the moderation list of that community, but you could also unsub from the list if you don’t like the mods there and sub to a group of people you trust more with mod decisions. Imagine if there’s an overeager mod in the community you subbed to and you wanted to exclude the modding decisions - mod lists would allow that.
The issue to that is some moderation is mandatory by law, e.g. CP, copyrighted works. So mods still have to have the ability to remove data from the instances server completely, not just hide it. And instances probably also want to be able to have enforced rules on top of that.
I think what could do better is federating on communities level. So if you post or comment to memes community, it can post or comment to version of the community on multiple instances, each with different moderators.
You make a good point about legal moderation. Modlists could work on top of that.
“serverless” communities have been suggested multiple times and hopefully they will be implemented someday. It is a good idea.
That, and discovery algorithms that are user controlled maybe.