It’s a total mess. I believe the original 196 (i forgot the instance) was a spin-off from reddit. At some point, it ended up on blahaj, where I first encountered it. For the last year or so, it’s basically been a meme channel barely above shitposts but often with a lot of trans memes.

Then recently the mod just unilaterally tried to “move” the community by locking up the blahaj instance and opening a new 196 on .world. The community backlashed, someone started onehundredninetysix and people spammed it heavily for a few days. Then, I believe, the old mod reopened the blahaj one or the admins gave it to someone else or… I dunno, my attention span for lemmy drama runs put around this point.

tl;dr, a bunch of mod drama has resulted in no less than 3 different 196 communities all of which are basically meme communities with low standards.