@tassoman@orwell.fun Pixiv is private company. After pixiv created pawoo.net, they saw a lot of controversy was happening on the platform so in order to not hurt the pixiv brand image, they passed on the maintenance to Russel @pawoo_russel@pawoo.net. However, the whole thing just was not profitable so they discontinued support around 2020, things happened, pawoo.net was passed over to Suji Yan.
As for the moderation, you are correct that many of the pawoo.net users weren't using the nsfw/sensitive tag on their images correctly. Which has raised some serious concern from the EU instances in a form of massive instance blocks.
Funny story: Pawoo.net was the reason why Mastodon now has "block media from instance" because the biggest problem wasn't just the moderation itself, but more so the fact that certain media which was legal in Japan was considered Illegal in many jurisdictions of Europe, hence the pawoo instance block.
Many have lifted the instance block on Pawoo since then, but a lot of pawoo.net users has migrated to misskey.io and Baraag so I don't even know if pawoo.net is "most censored in the western side" anymore because there isn't that many artists left on the platform; I think that title goes to Baraag today.
I think pawoo.net is historically the most interesting instance in the fediverse because its controversy; pawoo was rather well moderated in my opinion in comparison to many of the smaller instances at the time, but the biggest controversy came from the difference in culture and law between Japan and other countries and I find that fascinating a little.
For those of you who don't know, Suji Yan (the one with the silver hair wearing a gothic lolita dress) is the administrator of mastodon.cloud, mstdn.jp, and pawoo.net, which is the second largest fediverse instance in the world, the largest mastodon instance in Japan, and pawoo, which was originally founded by pixiv.
RE: https://mstdn.jp/users/Sujiyan/statuses/115299180403490168
パウーを支へ續けてきたモデレーターの皆様と @SujiYan さん、元管理人の @pawoo_russel さん、そして pawoo.net をこの世に產みおとした @pixiv さん、いままでほんとうにありがとうございました。
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