What instance were you on? I'm pretty sure every ActivityPub instance moderates their own content.
Discussion
Libredon, which to be fair, that instance was free speech focused. They all moderate, just to different degrees. Mastodon dot social is heavily moderated from what I remember. They don't federate with a good chunk of the network, so if you are on Mastodon you aren't seeing everything being pushed to the global feed because they outright block certain instances. I don't know if Liberdon did instance level blocking or not
Damn, in their code of conduct Libredon says they don't even allow slurs.
Sorry, I only know what the Nostr global feed looks like. I have never seriously used the Fediverse.