Okay so here's what happened.
There is a mod of some AI-generated image forums who has been slinging out bans for "anti-AI trolling" to people who have never participated in their community, apparently more or less at random. Full disclosure, I am one of those people, and I'm confident I have never done any anti-AI trolling.
Apparently the justification for this is that other people are being aggressively hateful to this mod, coming in and being incredibly abusive, transphobic, insulting her for alleged alcoholism and making fake pictures of her and generally just being horrible. Conveniently, one of these people showed up in the thread where we were talking about it, on cue, and started slinging around horribleness which provided a convenient cover for people to say "And THAT's why we have to be really strict with the bans!" type of things. We never really got to the bottom of what the connection was between that and the random bans to other people who were longstanding accounts that didn't seem to be doing any of those things.
Anyway, now another abusive alt of the (now obviously bannned) abusive alt that originally stirred up trouble has made a pitch-perfect effort to inflame divisions and create a balkanization between the "pro AI" people, centered around dbzer0 (edit: ~~and blahaj~~), and "anti AI" people, centered around everywhere else.
This is two identical posts, made to two separate communities which are guaranteed to have totally opposite takes on it based on their different levels of information about the issue, which will then lead everyone to assume that the other community is just being horrible about it on purpose when they draw different conclusions:
(Edit: The troll has now been banned, so I can't link to their posts anymore. Just imagine this post, except made by one of the trolls who are featured in the comments of that post, you can dig in the modlog or in spoiler text of some other comments to see some of what they were saying. Anyway, the troll posted the exact same complaint about being "unfairly" banned both to lemmy.world, where they got tons of sympathy and upvotes, and to dbzer0, where people who were aware of what they were up to gave them derision and downvotes.)
Like I said, if the goal is to create division and heated argument between two opposing "camps," this is pretty much as perfect as you can get it. I expect it to work, at least to a certain amount, to get people embittered towards one another and arguing about the issue impassioned that the other side is wrong and stupid.
I can't find the link right now, but there was someone on reddit who claimed that they used to do this professionally (trying to disrupt online communities so that organized shilling could succeed better there, because the previous coherence that they had had had been replaced by confusion and bickering, and then they could insert bullshit without it being pushed back on as strongly.) It's fascinating. What they described isn't exactly like this, but it definitely sort of rings similar to me. Just to throw that out there.
Also, UniversalMonk is involved, because of course he is.
Edit: Fun with grammar
Yeah, I was one of the ones banned from a number of AI communities despite not engaging with them really on my old Lemm.ee account. With UM involved, I suppose I shouldn't be surprised :) Sounds like just the sort of shit he'd have a hand in stirring up and just the way he'd do it.
I'm not involved though. I have nothing to do with it. Someone saying, "universalmonk is involved!" doesn't make it real. Please provide any proof that I have anything to do with what OP is talking about. I'm not the mod of the community OP is talking about, nor the person posting that OP is talking about. I've commented on comment about the issue, as many are doing here right now, but I have nothing to do with the actual issue.
So, to me it's weird that there's such a large number of people (probably over 50% of the responses) that reacted to this by saying that it makes perfect sense. That's strange to me, I want to understand it, and I don't really. One possibility though like I mentioned is that people are deliberately trying to stir up shit between the instances for whatever reason. And then, out of the couple dozen people who happened to weigh in, up pops up your username, and you have a history of dishonest participation and trying to stir up shit. That coincidence is notable to me. Doesn't necessarily mean it means anything, it's just interesting. That's what I was saying.
Sorry if you took some (reasonable) offense to me calling you out by name. If it helps you understand it, maybe you could imagine that I changed my profile to say that I'm known for my defiant stand against weird bad-faith participation, and I'm still standing proud and won't be silenced!
I've went ahead and DM'd you so we can continue this conversation. Based on you bringing my name up here, good chance someone will try to get me banned from here soon. Which is fine, but I'd like to carry on the conversation. I appreciate your logic, but not your conclusions about me.