I used Ruqqus primarily after I left Reddit. I liked it a lot, but then the site admins went full Reddit and started banning users and subs without warning or explanation. That caused a bunch of users to leave and killed the momentum they had.

After that, I'm not sure what happened. I stayed on until they shutdown. I heard some rumors that said they'd been pressured to shutdown over their politics. Some suggested it was because they ran out of money. Some said they site runners just realized it was going to be a lot more work and more risk than they wanted to accept.

Trolls on Reddit like to pretend that the site just got "overrun with Nazis" and that's what killed it. And while there definitely were a few of those kinds of people, those were the minority from my experience, and they were easy for me to block.

I think the site was just an experiment that they lost interest in. However, the code for the site is open source, and a couple other sites are using it to host forums.

Currently, other than Saidit, which is probably my main news aggregator, I like Gab.com and Communities.win.