I understand the liability issue, I guess this is just an inherent tradeoff with how the fediverse works.
I at least think there could be a two stage ban, ‘no posting here’ and ‘block everything’.
Also, defederation could still be used for instances that fail to moderate, although I do agree that fully blocking a user is much preferable to the nuclear option.
That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’m saying it would be best if content on remote instances wasn’t censored when viewed on a local instance, even if that user was banned locally.
I think this problem is hard to get around though with how all content has to be hosted locally.