People like porn and it's most of the activity on the internet. Taking porn away means you lose a substantial portion of your activity, including people who used your site for both sfw and nsfw content and shit snowballs as advertisers and other members see activity die.
Tumblr was a safe haven for a lot of LGBTQ niches, for most of them it was the only place they could go that wasn't fetishized to hell. They created a safe place for those. For some of them there were blogs that were NSFW technically but they were about sex ed.
Banning NSFW wasn't removing dudes shoving porn spam, it was about removing all of those safe havens. With those gone for some it was no longer what they need d and for the rest it proves that the trust had been lost.
very abbreviated tl;dw: Adult content mattered because people could express and explore their sexual identity, not only LGBTQ+ people but everyone. After that disappeared, the users didn't want to interact with a corporate site which is trying to exploit them. It went from indie project to Verizon/Oath daughter company.
There are a lot of lessons we can learn from the downfall of tumblr for the Fediverse aswell. I am glad there are Mastodon communities which welcome explicit content creators. But some of the comments for that video suggest that they aren't able to connect to people outside of that bubble, since these people's instances might block NSFW ones.
In addition to that, blocking tags like #abuse is an awesome mental health feature which should definitely be embraced by the Fediverse and Lemmy in particular.
But some of the comments for that video suggest that they aren’t able to connect to people outside of that bubble, since these people’s instances might block NSFW ones.
I think a lot of times that's due to the risk of hosting potentially illegal federated content from nsfw instances.
Tangentially related, but I'm reminded of the Good Writers Are Perverts manifesto, that espouses the idea, among others, that perverts that make art about their perversion make good art because they're passionate about it, and the passion shows alongside the fetish and/or because of it.