uhh I don’t remember the full story but here’s what I know.
There was a subreddit called r/195 from some people who lived together in an apartment or dorm in room 195. They would shitpost and it eventually caught on. After they shut down the sub for whatever reason people moved to r/196 to shitpost on instead.

why there’s “onehundredandnindeysix” and “196” is because the moderators of the 196 Lemmy sub power tripped and tried to move to lemmy.world, so half the community split to another version and half stayed on the existing one (the mods cancelled the move to Lemmy.wirld)
I personally use the “onehundredandnindeysix” one.

(also sorry if typos or sthm, I’m on a weird Lemmy interface that’s confusing)