It was a dorm room number. So whenever people would visit them in the dorm, they had to post something before they left. Then when they moved out of the dorms, the sub went unmoderated. Nazis quickly took over and ran off all of the other posters.
196 was the successor, made by the people who were tired of the blatant Nazi-posting. They moderated it heavily due to the Nazi bar problem, so it quickly became a haven for left-leaning people, and especially trans people.
With the move off of Reddit, they chose blahaj largely because of the admins; Ada is controversial for being heavy-handed in their moderation, but it’s due to the same aforementioned Nazi bar problem. In a world that is increasingly hostile towards trans people, allowing even the slightest bit of leeway in moderation allows transphobes to take root. So the admin style meshed really well with the way Reddit’s 196 was already moderated.
The moderators for 196@blahaj eventually took a “this sub belongs to us, not the users” stance, and tried to move to lemmy.world instead. Mods said it was to try and consolidate the user bases, but many users suspected it was a power move to give more mod power to .world’s moderators. This was deeply unpopular with a lot of the users, and ended with !onehundredninetysix@lemmy.blahaj.zone being created in protest.
Thanks, I didn’t know the exact events between 1 and 2, and 3 and 4 is very interesting