In general I’d agree and say yeah, let people decide for themselves but content like this, which normalises or legitimises real world harms, shouldn’t be something easily stumbled upon.
Viewing that sort of content, or building community around its enjoyment, isn’t going to lead anywhere good.
Allowing it to show up here is net-negative.
Absolutely block instances hosting illegal content - the way federation works means copies / caches of content can end up on this server? Or even if that’s not how lemmy does it, it risks using this server to facilitate the spread of something incredibly harmful & damaging.
As far as I’m concerned there’s no argument for allowing / normalising content produced which quite literally ruins peoples lives.
Edit: Even stuff that’s purely cartoonish in nature for me is just grim, and I don’t want to be a part of a community which supports it.
Edit2: If a server can block a specific community posting CSAM then maybe that’s a better solution than blocking the underlying infrastructure. If that’s not possible, I think defederation is the only real way to deal it, as frustrating as that would be for legitimate users.
I think people can have a heathy relationship with porn, and yeah there are a lot of puritanical views that sound superficially convincing, especially in direct comparison to addictive substances.
It’s hard for a lot of people to approach this subject from a place of empathy and I think shunning a group could risk the same harms as condoning the behaviour; you end up with a group that convinces itself of an internally invisible false narrative, and there’s nobody there to oppose it.
The presence of these images though indicates a group of people who think they’re is ok, who are likely accessing more extreme images, and ultimately creates a sense of normalcy around consumption. I don’t think ordinary discussion should be juxtaposed with that and it shouldn’t be freely available on a general purpose site.