Back in December, the instance hosting 196 (lemmy.blahaj.zone) announced that, as part of its mission as a trans-friendly space, harassment based on gender or neopronouns would remain prohibited—even if the user in question was suspected of being a troll. Users were asked to disengage, block, and report suspected trolling behavior rather than bring harassment into a community already vulnerable to that kind of bullying.

There was a small backlash to the policy from some users. This led to a number of “toe the line” posts that weren’t outright gender-based harassment but strongly signaled an intent to misgender or harass in the future. Blahaj admins promptly removed all offending comments during this wave of dissent.

Important to note: The majority of the Blahaj and 196 users supported the policy, upvoting and praising the admins for creating a safe space for trans individuals.

By January, the backlash had mostly subsided, and the trolls causing issues had moved on. However, 196 moderator @moss and their team remained unhappy with the policy. They cited “personal differences” and felt Blahaj admins had overstepped by removing comments themselves rather than allowing 196 mods to address users who openly expressed intent to harass others.

Yesterday, @moss and the 196 moderation team enacted a major decision without consulting the community. They locked [email protected] and instructed users to move to [email protected].

This move was extremely unpopular. Many users strongly dislike lemmy.world for various reasons (a complicated topic better unpacked elsewhere). The announcement post was met with widespread backlash, and @moss eventually locked it. In response, a few users created a new community on Blahaj: [email protected]. The new community quickly grew in size and activity, with most users opting to stay on Blahaj rather than migrate to lemmy.world.

It’s clear @moss and the 196 moderators underestimated the community’s attachment to its home on Blahaj. By attempting to uproot the group without input, they alienated much of the community. As a result, most users have moved to the new Blahaj-hosted community, which has already become the more active space.

TL;DR:
@Moss and the 196 mod team tried to move the community to lemmy.world without consulting anyone. The decision was extremely unpopular, leading to backlash and the creation of a new Blahaj-hosted community that most users now prefer.

The really quick summary is that the mods of the 196 community on blahaj.zone wanted to move the community to lemmy.world, but did not announce it publicly to the users or seek their input, and so when the announcement came out, users of the instance felt blindsided by the announcement, and that lemmy.world was a fairly unpopular choice of instance. The resulting discussion from the thread largely did not dissuade skeptical users and contributed to the feelings that the mods were making a unilateral decision based on their desire and ignoring what the users of 196 wanted, and the decision to keep the original community on lemmy.blahaj.zone locked meant that users who did not want to post on lemmy.world were losing out their community.

This resulted in another 196 clone being created on blahaj, the original 196 becoming unlocked, and so now there are 3 196 communities. The newest one, [email protected], has a particularly high posting rate right now, as users are attempting to assert that community’s support as opposed to the ones run by the mods of the original and the lemmy.world communities.

I block most meme based communities because they overpower the rest of what I like, but I’ve been picking up bits of the events from context.

Does this center around the one individual using, shall we say, a very distinct set of pronouns that a lot of people took issue with?

I kind of enjoyed that person in a social commentary way, but I can see why people more directly effected by pronoun usage may have taken issue and blahaj changing their rules due to it, but if that is what is causing this big schism, that’s a pretty wild thing that all is this is the result. I’m interested in the opinions on both sides, but it’s one of these things I’m afraid to ask due to polarization like this. I have genuine curiosity but I can totally see how someone could trollishly go after the same info.

Mods made a dictator decree to move the community to world, and blocking the old one. People did not agree and made their own new one. On the original instance. Spam in the new community ensued.

Either way, old one was blocked for me. New one too.

Imagine an apartment building. The landlord decides the local city council is too overbearing, and decides to move to a different city. They expect the tenants to move with them.

Problem 1: The local city is known for inclusivity, and the new city is known for being overpopulated and having an overbearing city council. Either the landlord has sinister motives or didn’t do their research.

Problem 2: The tenants weren’t told of the move before the moving van came, and were given no opportunity to weigh in on the decision. The landlord was calling all the shots.

Problem 3: The landlord sealed the building as they moved, making it impossible for someone else to take over as landlord and keep the building running. There was really no reason to do that.

This went about as smoothly as you’d expect. While the landlords did eventually unseal the building, a lot of people completely lost faith in them and moved into a new apartment building in the same city, but with a new landlord ( [email protected] ).

https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/20937206

Mods of [email protected] locked the community on blåhaj and wanted to forcefully move over to lemmy.world. Most people didn’t like that and someone created [email protected] as an alternative.

Semi-related question: What the fuck is 196? I’ve never understood what it was, just that it was a carry-over from Reddit. Me browsing it is like Homer Simpson reading a Far Side calendar: “I don’t get it. I don’t get it. I don’t get it. LOL…I don’t get it.”

Ya, i woke up this morning to my entire feed being nothing but their “rules” posts. Didn’t take more than a few minutes before that place got blocked. My block list is sooo long here….

I think there is some drama with the mods but I am also lost and waiting for someone to clarify it.

I too was confused so read the post the mod wrote. Admins were banning users without telling mods. Admin said they were banning because mods weren’t doing their job. Mods talked to admin and they agreed moving to world would be better. Users got angry because no one told them.

From what I’ve gathered, the main mod (Ada?) seemed to have seen some problems in federation between blahaj and lemmyworld, maybe some other concerns too. So they decided to up and move the community, closing the original 196 to mod-only. It seems there is pushback about the decision, with other mods speaking up with disagreement over the move and the reasons for it, so have started the onehundredninetysix community on blahaj.

I think that’s the gist of it

Mod team wanted to move to another instance due to oddities and frustration with modding on a difference instance to their accounts(with a light amount of disagreement with instance admins, though not really drama worthy), and they elected to do so without any warning or community input. Many people were displeased by this, which was compounded by the decision to lock the old community rather than simply abandon it and let someone else take over.

You then get a mix of opportunists, drama vampires, the standard fare “all change is bad”, and people that were just unhappy that the decision was made suddenly and opaquely, all working to try to make a new community on .blahaj, with varying levels of smugness, bickering, and some level of actual reasonable discourse hidden beneath it all.

We’ll see “which” 196 ends up being the de facto, but my money’s on .world just due to user numbers and the fact that the old 196 was basically the only community anybody outside of .blahaj ever saw from the instance in my experience.