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...

During the original reddit exodus, I tried it out.

It sucked. The interface was clunky, features bare bones at best, and it was prone to heavy lag.

And then it got worse, and nobody with half a brain stayed.

Seriously, it was good to have it there at the time, but it's dead now in any realistic sense

Oh man, it's country restricted now?

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.

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.

First I've heard of it, but my first thought is that I don't want to socialize on a website named after petty arguments.

was that the one that was just reskinned Mastodon while lying about being Mastodon?