I'm curious to hear how a non-corporate NSFW community can thrive safely? You said you don't have any answers - does anyone else?
I have the technical knowledge and plenty of money to run a lemmy instance and enough time to dev some moderation tools. But it seems like the issue isn't technical.
If somebody brought me a few full-time moderators and a lawyer or two (who I don't have to pay), I'd happily spin up an instance with terabytes of storage and start developing whatever tools the mods need. If somebody guarantees me I won't be liable and won't EVER see CP, I'll provide the servers, sysadmin, and some dev work.
Reddit has something special with their unpaid mods - I can't see it working any other way, but a group of mods like gonewild or something is probably one in 10milion.
Quick edit: I also want to say that I agree with everything you said :)
Not saying you're wrong at all, but I just did the test and it's kinda funny that the title of this article would certainly have been one of the "fake news" examples.
Obviously the study shows that the test is useful (as you pointed out quite well!), but it's ironic that the type of "bait" that they want people to recognize as fake news was used as the title of the article for the paper.
(Also, not saying the authors knew about or approved the article title or anything)