My impression is that Blahaj accepted the 196 lifeboat without necessarily knowing much about it. Many of us on Hexbear had experiences with it on Reddit because on the surface it seems cool, but it's always had some strong Vaushite tendencies that we really dislike.

:::spoiler tangent

Imo he plays the controversy game of "Say stuff that makes group A mad at me in order to appeal to group B, who hates group A." That leads to saying problematic and harmful stuff but there's always this layer of plausible deniability, and all criticism, legitimate or not, gets dismissed as coming from the bad outgroup ("tankies"). When our site first started we had a ton of posts criticizing him but then we figured out it's better to just ignore his antics.

I've been worried since the start that federation with 196 was a ticking time bomb, but I've been pleasantly surprised that the users haven't really been posting bait or trying to antagonize us, but unfortunately I can't say the same for this mod. From what you said it sounds like they do similar controversy bait tactics.