Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko says the social network reached 2.5M MAUs in November

I'm curious where you get the idea that there are zero people involved with moderating Mastodon? Moderation is probably the main workload of people involved with running instances.

With fewer than 45 million monthly users, unlike Twitter, at least you don't have to follow the Digital Services Act:

https://www.accessnow.org/digital-services-act-eu-content-mo...

You will need to actively prune bad content posted by users on your server or other servers will block you. If you dont have other people on your instance, then you only need to worry about your posts being so bad that other servers ban you. There is no way to know how many moderators there are on Mastadon servers, as it is decentralized. Also, twitter had large amount of moderators as it's userbase is WAY HIGHER than mastodon. We are talking hundreds of millions of more active users.

>what do I have to do to stop it from filling with unsavory material?

You don't federate with instances you don't like or remove specific users.

>Why did (former) Twitter have 'hundreds' of people in moderation, while Mastodon manages with zero?

Every server admin is his own moderator.

German companies have to put U.S. feds on salary?

They don't need feds, since "Mastadon" does't have an internal side, besides official instances.