tl;dr: The owner is alt-right and drove away pretty much everyone from the site, which is now a ghost town.
It gained about 30k users relatively quickly. The owner then went full alt-right and declared it a "free speech platform" which caused it to lose about 99% of its users (most of which moved to Discuit). After that, it was basically just 10 or so users posting some pretty racist content.
Recently, the owner put the site behind a waitlist to hide the fact that it basically has no active users...
I was there for a while after leaving reddit. It was one of the hardest self-destructs I've ever seen. That dev actually had something good and growing at the time.
From what I got the owner isn't alt-right but rather the naive kind of libertarian who thinks "free speech" won't turn his site into a nazi bar.. which severely backfired on him lol
Squablr? It went through such an evolution during the API fiasco. The dev flip flopped so much, would delete their posts so you couldn't reference back to previous statements. After getting a dedicated user base with some committed posters he decided to pivot to "free speech" out of the blue, I guess he didn't like the overly friendly crowd he had found. I wonder if I have an account still.
I just visited a few minutes ago. There is literally only a handful of post and the newest one is 6 hours old.
There is a post by the owner saying that he will remove the "all" feed vs pivot to having a dedicated Tab for influencers. As if influencers will be attracted to an empty platform.
Once I saw that it wasn't open. Felt like going from one site that is controlled by a single person to another closed one controlled by a single person again.
I don't think so? Unless something changed recently that site wasn't even federated with anything, it was (is?) just it's own standalone website. In the beginning the dev/owner couldn't even decide how to display posts/conversations & changed the display format a few times.
I remember for a while the dev/owner would use throwaway Reddit accounts to spam his website every time people were discussing Reddit alternatives, like "hey you should check out this one, it's great!" sort of spam. The spam was enough to turn me off from creating an account there.. and realistically it didn't look like it was going to gain any real traction.
This stuff about the owner going alt-right is news to me, it's been off my radar so long I never bothered checking if it still existed.