You can do whatever you want... however, so too can they. I may or may not agree with either side (fwiw Drag is obviously trolling, though that also seems entirely irrelevant?), but I defend blahaj's right to do as they please on their own instance - which they pay for and maintain with little help from others on the Fediverse? - and the post "Neopronouns are not trolling" seems fairly clear to me.

My problem lies rather with how that is not communicated clearly to people. It is not linked in the sidebar, it is not pinned even on lemmy.blahaj.zone, it is in a community that I at first thought was Local-Only b/c it was difficult to find from Lemmy.World (b/c of the different display "Blahaj Lemmy Meta" vs. link-to names !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone) - although it also seems cross-posted to 196 (but why MUST someone be subscribed to that one?) - and especially: when you visit that (cross-)post from some other instance, let's say lemmy.world via this link, the only text you see on the sidebar is for c/196, not the sidebar of lemmy.blahaj.zone, or from this link the text for the Meta community is equally uninformative, plus most apps don't show any sidebar text by default anyway, either burying it behind several button presses or perhaps not making it available at all.

So if you just wandered into a post federated and therefore hosted elsewhere, you may have no clue what is going on there? This is exasperated further by the sidebar text of !196@lemmy.blahaj.zone or !main@lemmy.blahaj.zone stating "other rules" which links to Lemmy.World, even when visited while on lemmy.blahaj.zone!?!? And then that post says nothing whatsoever about neopronouns - the closest mention is "prejudice of any kind" is banned but this is definitely a more contentious issue that those 4 words do not next to nothing to clarify. Also I don't see much of anything in the Lemmy.World ToS that would apply - possibly the text about "misinformation" but again, that seems far from clear, and more for an issue where the admins of Lemmy.World and the admins of lemmy.blahaj.zone would need to come to some kind of mutual agreement or at least understanding.

The tools made available on the Fediverse to help guide people into understanding what the rules are are abysmally inadequate. Ada can run their own instance however they wish, though it sure would be good to find better ways to communicate the expected behaviors rather than "ban people" or "not ban people" after waiting for them to walk into this issue unknowingly. I guess there is also "defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" vs. "not defederate from lemmy.blahaj.zone" as well - though it sucks that no other options in-between have yet been presented here. Beehaw at least has its core principles statement, though it too is not linked to from anywhere unless you visit the instance explicitly in order to investigate it (except from PieFed, where a message is presented - that's fucking awesome!:-D).

Things like this are why imho the Fediverse is not at all like merely using emails. There you simply click "Send" and it goes off to wherever it needs to be, but to navigate Lemmy without being banned for some off-hand remark requires quite a bit deeper knowledge than that.

So like, if you had read the aforementioned post about "Neopronouns are not trolling", then YDI (which b/c people won't read the sidebar even in this community, stands for "You Deserved It":-D) for inciting drama? However, if you had not, I definitely see why it at least comes across as a BPR ("Bait-Provoked Reaction"), coming a day or two after that "announcement" had been made (which again, how were people supposed to have known that?). Therefore it is at least possible that you are both correct, and merely talking past one another, each not willing to find common ground with the other.