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, !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone, 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.

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 ( !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone ).

The mod team tried to move everything to .world. No one liked that and now there’s !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone !196@lemmy.world and !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone the top two are run by the old mod team, the last one is ran by a new mod team. Blahaj zone and onehundresninetysix are active. (Rip 196.world, gone and certainly forgotten.) The mod team and admin had a drama over heavy handed admin over reach on bans in 196blahaj.

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….

Onehundrednightysix is stupid. You should have just named it oneninesix

This post isn’t really broad enough for the intent of the creator(s) of this community (not me) but I’m not one to remove a post that already has active discussion.

That said:

I’ll look through but I’m generally here as more an extra set of eyes for the most egregious content, rather than to be deciphering through individual threads. Locking is an option I may have to use and tbh someone else here may still lock or remove it.

I get this is a contentious topic. I don’t want to stifle discussion. I prefer to mod passively. I volunteered here because no one else was and I’m already clearly active enough.

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.

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.

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.

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

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