Centralised moderation teams often lack the context to know what they're looking at. Fediverse admins each take care of a small, well-defined bit of overall moderation; the bit that affects accounts on their server. They know what's acceptable in their community.
Fediverse admins usually have an account on their own server, and any moderators they recruit certainly do. So it's in their direct self-interest to make sure their servers don't serve unsuitable posts to its accounts. They don't want their accounts caught up in server blocks, so they are motivated to do a good job of moderating posts to their server.
Whereas trust and safety teams on centralised platforms have only one intrinsic incentive; doing enough to keep their jobs.
"Mastodon users probably aren’t aware of CSAM on the platform unless it leaks into their federated timelines. This can happen when a fellow user on their instance follows an account posting CSAM. Ways to handle this problem are few. Though users who follow CSAM-disseminating accounts can be suspended from an instance by administrators, they can easily set up a new account on another..."
They certainly can set up a new account on another instance. But posts from accounts they follow won't appear in the federated timeline of the original instance. It becomes a problem for the admin of the new instance, who can also just kill their account. All of this is likely to be noticed and acted on much quicker than it can be on a centralised platform.
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