My guess is that the 196 mods decided to do this because they have lemmy.world friends who got banned from blahaj.zone. There has been a growing disconnect between some frequent posters of 196, and the rest of the community. They post good stuff and might even contribute a majority of the content on some days, but they also have edgier sensibilities and higher tolerances for bullshit. This situation doesn’t seem ideological to the mods because their motivation is personal. However, personal relationships play a larger role in our beliefs than most people think.

Interesting theory