What the fuck is going on with 196/onehundredninetysix?

submitted by baggachipz@sh.itjust.works

I know there was some schism and moving of instances, but beyond that I can’t deduce what happened/is happening.

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117 Comments

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.

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This comment would probably make for a good crosspost to [email protected]

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on it!

edit: https://lemmy.cafe/post/12094663 thanks again for the suggestion

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Great write-up, thanks. I love a good shit-show. 🍿

Sounds to me like the OG mods could have said “we don’t like how the admin runs things here, we are leaving as mods and starting a new 196 on .world with hookers and blackjack, you guys do what you want here.”

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I genuinely would have had no problem with that, and I think most others would agree with me.

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Which everyone would think is fine, but that would mean they'd be mods of an empty community, and thus have no power, and that of course made them upset.

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I guess they decided to forget the hookers ...... and the blackjack.

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Oof. Rookie mistake. Even if people aren't against a move most people won't follow you to the new site simply because of laziness. It kills communities.

There really should be a life shattering reason to move a community to a new site.

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Yup. Clearly, “the admin is going to generally protect trans identities on her instance” didn’t ring as “life shattering” to too many. 😸

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Hi! Have spent time in LGBTQ spaces; have never seen any such thing.

You have a disturbing modlog so I do hope you stay over there on .world. I sure won’t miss you.

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They stated pretty directly it wasn't about the Dragonfucker incident, nor did it involve policies on neopronouns. Drag wasn't even banned for anything to do with neopronouns.

I think the move to lemmy.world was a mistake, but I believe them when they say it has nothing to do with the neopronouns policy.

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Yeah I think the above comment is inappropriately tying the issue to a topic they specifically said wasn't the motivation

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It's the prevailing narrative though, so I guess it may as well be the truth.

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"the misinformation is popular, despite those involved disregarding it. so I shall believe it."

?

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That seems to be the gist of what is happening en masse, yes. Regardless of what the true events may be, this is how everyone is going to end up remembering it.

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Correct. Nevertheless the neopronouns incident was something of a catalyst; all the “differences” had to do with trans issues in some way, and it would be amiss of me not to point out the biggest moment that made 196 come out in support of Ada and Blahaj.

Their other “differences” are also bogus in my opinion.

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Anyone who is angry they can't whip out queerphobia when they're annoyed at someone who uses neopronouns doesn't understand why it's not OK to say racist shit about Clarance Thomas, misogynistic shit about JK Rowling, or transphobic shit about Keffals.

Just a huge red flag that respecting other people's humanity is contingent on benefiting them.

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Exactly. It's fine to attack their horrid personalities, terrible actions and all-round aweful nature, but we don't attack people based on things they can't control.

They chose to be fucking terrible, and we can attack that, it's really pretty simple, and easy too.

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Thanks for the writeup ... there should be some kind of news service for stuff like this. Everyone notices weird changes on lemmy but not everyone is in tune to every detail, every personality, every major user or mod, every instance, every community and everything they're doing.\

All I saw were the changes and activities but I had no clue who, what, where or why .... which meant you didn't know who supports what or for what reason.

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I was watching that community over the past day or two and didn't see any news about any of this until now .... things were happening on Lemmy, lots of new posts from 196 everywhere and noise about a controversy there and no info for those who don't know until this post was made

fediverselore is good .... it's just a bit slow in the uptake

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It usually waits for the dust to settle.

[email protected] might be more what you're looking for

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I was trying to understand who was who and now I know. Cheers

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Fantastic write up. Reminds me of a post on Hobby Drama.

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I wonder if Blahaj admins will kick out all the mods who locked 196 and replace them with the mods who created oneninetysix.

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No and no. Ada stated that she will not oust the mod team, and she is currently the mod of onehundredninetysix, though is trying to find someone else to take it over as she has no interest in being mod.

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Nope. You might be unaware, but the .world community is not brand new and has been around for more than a year. So it already had plenty of subscribers and activity before this incident.

[email protected] is *brand new* and is already popping off. That is undeniably significant.

If you don’t see posts that’s a federation issue on your end. Try subscribing from your instance to help it along.

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Deleted it since I found out I was putting out missinfo. The one on .world has more subscriber but the one on blahaj has more daily activity

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yep, that is accurate and thx 4 taking accountability :3

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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.

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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] ).

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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."

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Some guy made a subreddit called 195 (named after their dorm room number IIRC) where the only rule was that you had to post something before leaving. They later closed the subreddit because it had gotten too large to operate by one person. 196 was created by the community as a successor with the same one rule. Just post. Simple as.

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Missing a real chance to continue adding up here. The current one should be 198

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The continuation of /r/196.

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=r%2F196

r/196

A subreddit that gained popularity due to only having one rule, which is to post before leaving. The sub started after it's predecessor, r/195, was shut down by the moderators.

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For me, a place where people post dumb and entertaining memes. I guess the origin was “rule 196” which says that you have to post something before you leave or log off. But whatever, dumb meme, me press up button.

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A place to shitpost.

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Edit: seems my memory of the quantity was wrong.

--

I think in Rainman, when the 200 toothpicks fell to the ground, Ray counted 196 instantly. There were four left in the box.

The sub name is unrelated, but that's how I think of it :)

Time to go counting cards...

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Well in Rain Man, he counted 246 toothpicks ("82, 82, 82.") out of 250

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The mod team tried to move everything to .world. No one liked that and now there's [email protected] [email protected] and [email protected] 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.

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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.

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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.

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It's a broader disagreement that's been simmering for a while. The 196 mods say that the Drag controversy is unrelated, as Dragonfucker had been banned from 196 long before for unrelated reasons.

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The 196 mods say that the Drag controversy is unrelated, as Dragonfucker had been banned from 196 long before for unrelated reasons.

Although...this is some sort of spat relating to pronouns, and as I recall, isn't that guy's thing referring to himself using the third person?

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The spat is unrelated to pronouns or neopronouns, according to the 196 mods. It has to do with the Blahaj admins and the 196 mods disagreeing on moderation behavior for the community, and the 196 mods not wanting to have their own moderation decisions reversed or second-guessed by admins if there wasn't a rule violation in how the 196 mods handled moderation.

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Thanks for these responses. I hope everyone reaches a satisfactory resolution to this. I don't like to see communities or instances infighting, but I suppose it's just part of us growing as a platform.

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part of us growing as a platform.

Unfortunately, we're not even growing

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Home brew drama is driving genuine engagement...

Let them fight, bring some popcorn!

At the end of the day, they ain't leaving fedi so it is win win

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You know damn well it has nothing to do with pronouns. It’s about your abuse of them. You’re just making the “attack helicopter” argument, but in a way that’s subtle enough to be believable by those gullible enough to be taken advantage of.

You’ve been banned from several instances for trolling, and finally found one that buys into it- thus creating even more of that savory drama for yourself.

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Right, but, uh, weren’t you specifically one of the people who Ada banned even though the 196 mods didn’t want you banned, because you said on 196 that a nonbinary gender identity wasn’t valid?

No, but nice try. Very typical of your brand of trolling.

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Why are you being so vague about what the disagreement was?

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As I understand it, it wasn't a singular disagreement, but a number of incidents in which, as I said, the 196 mods didn't want to have their own moderation decisions reversed or second-guessed if 196's ruleset was in compliance with the requirements of the instance.

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That user claims they are enunciating neopronouns, but yes, the inconsistent third person syntax fucks it all up

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Neopronouns aren’t trolling. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone saying otherwise. I believe YOU are though. There’s a wake of drama behind you miles long.

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How fucking insulting you are to even think to compare yourself to them. This is absolutely evidence you’re here in bad faith to troll.\

You’re a troll because you fit the descriptor definition, and you create unnecessary drama everywhere you go. Again, MODLOGS.

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sounds like me. I don't specifically hate memes but like new ones pop up constantly and some seem to be generated just so an individual can throw things up. dank ass, memeorama, funny home of the fun, just all over the place. I actually just blocked 196 a bit ago because I was loathe since I consider it a bit more historically legit but man I want like less than 1% to be memes.

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It's just too much. Even the ones I find funny, there is just too much, and with so many communities and cross posting they multiply. And things like the Star Trek instance, I've seen some episodes and some of the movies, but I'm not into Trek so much I need a steady stream of that every day!

I like when people reference memes in response to something I post and I can look up whatever it is on Know Your Meme and enjoy it. That's probably not how memes are exactly meant to be enjoyed, but it's how I can appreciate most of them. Maybe a little too Abe Simpson yells at cloud, but I'm allowed to operate how I want! 😇

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I agree here to. I mostly like something that has discourse happening and if someones discourse is a relevant meme then thats fine. Although if everyones discourse was meme it would be like ugh. Its best when used sparringly.

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Exactly, I appreciate them as a condiment, not a main dish!

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oh thats a perfect analogy. I might even take it higher because I say something like this with bacon and cheese. Both are incredible. Fabulous. I have and can eat them straight, but I mostly like them on things. Bacon cheeseburger, bacon wrapped X, Cheese X.

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Thanks for the clarification that it was an enforcement rather than a change. I feel that is significant to the story.

I still believe that it isn't trolling, as you/drag are far too consistent and what you/drag posts is really just regular, responsible, non-inflammatory stuff, at least what of it I've come across, though I avoid most edgier posts in general.

If people don't like it, they have numerous options to ignore or avoid the posts and comments, I don't see why so many have to actively trash what guidelines you've/drag have asked people to respect.\

As a CIS/het, I will freely admit I don't know enough about the issues to judge if this is helpful or hurtful to the non-binary community as a whole, but until I see you/drag do something rude, I have no complaints about giving you what consideration you ask for, as you/drag have been nothing but respectful to me. It doesn't make me feel like any other non-binary people are a joke or anything like that. Different things make different people happy, and if what I've read from your comments has all been genuine, your/drag's life isn't the easiest, and if me be respectful of some word choices can make life not worse, it's the least I can do.

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I come on here to escape the shittiness of real life and to be positive. It doesn't matter to me who or what anyone here wants to be, as long as they're here being cool with everyone else. Online is built for freedom, escapism, and expression of all kinds, and I don't like seeing people step on that. For those of us that can appreciate the unique color you bring, I love it as an expression of that freedom.

People here will play as a DND character, a LARPer, study HEMA, or treat the Tolkien universe as a pseudo-reality, and no one will bat an eye, but someone wants to be called a dragon out of established content and all of a sudden we have to crush them? It doesn't make sense to me. Again, they can ignore you, or filter you out, they don't need to throw insults when they see drag pop up. I don't get what that accomplishes.

I don't want to keep going with this here, as it appears I unintentionally dragged you/drag into something that drag isn't directly involved in, so apologies for that, but I'm still pro-drag based on my personal experience. This might make me seem foolish to some, but what you are doing fits in my vision of online freedom is with no issues.

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Nice comment

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Onehundrednightysix is stupid. You should have just named it oneninesix

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1000009147

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They should’ve called it 197

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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.

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We’ll see “which” 196 ends up being the de facto, but my money’s on .world just due to user numbers

*investigates*

As of this writing, it looks like the userbase on each is:

Community Subscriber Count
[email protected] 270
[email protected] 4490

EDIT: [email protected] has 16,800 subscribers, but if you figure that it's been around for a while and probably some of those accounts aren't active or are duplicates from people changing home instance or the like, active users might be a better metric. It's had 1.46k users active in the last day, 5.38k users in the last week, 9.8k users in the last month, and 19.4k users in the last 6 months.

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I wouldn’t wanna call it for a few weeks at the very least, and sub numbers feel like an odd metric to me since I barely sub to anything on lemmy. The blahaj instance seems to have a lot more activity at the moment for instance, but a lot of that was just frantically reposting old content from the other instance so 🤷🏻‍♂️

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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….

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I've blocked hundreds of communities. Kinda the opposite approach to subscribing by building a list of personalized content from scratch; I've whittled down All to mostly good content.

196 is on the blocklist 3 times now, lol.

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I blocked them long ago and they came back from dead. I blocked them again. They are not funny and they post a lot. They invade my feed like a virus. Can't have that!

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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.

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I didn’t mean to stir up shit, I was genuinely curious and wanted to… Ask Lemmy.

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No problem. Though I'll be locking this post. It really generated lots of reports and drama in the comments section.

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The fur freaks are being catty, just wait for the dust to settle.

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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.

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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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main mod (Ada?)

Ada isn't a mod of [email protected]. Ada is the admin of lemmy.blahaj.zone.

EDIT: While I'm not subscribed to 196 -- not really my cup of tea -- and I haven't been following whatever the issue is, I probably would have moved it too, for more-general reasons. While lemmy.blahaj.zone doesn't, as far as I know, have any real restrictions on non-trangender content, it's really a special-interest instance aimed at transgender stuff. It's kind of like setting up a community about Shakespeare on yiffit.net -- it's not like the yiffit.net crowd is going to take issue with it, but it's a special-interest instance aimed at adult furry stuff, and that probably isn't what you're going for unless your angle is specifically an adult furry take on Shakespeare. Which, I mean, I guess someone could be, but I don't think is the case with 196.

EDIT2: A curious search on Kagi reveals that apparently there is a published dating sim game on Steam specifically dealing with furry Shakespeare with multiple DLCs. I'll be damned.

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Never underestimate the power of the internet :D

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