The downfall of ruqqus began when they (ruqqus) banned mgtow, who had migrated from reddit after a ban there, and a bunch of other guilds, and failed to provide a good reason for that or evidence of broken rules. This contrasted sharply with the free speech forum promise that ruqqus had been promoting before. Then the ruqqus admins said that they "pivoted" to be more an open source project and less a free speech community. And then of course everyone just left and ruqqus became a wasteland.