It's mostly a result of him believing he's self-made and therefore must have some sort of superior knowledge to the rest of the world. Classic case of being born on third base and thinking you hit a home run.
All the more reason to use something like SimpleLogin. Sure they can have my email, but it's unique to them and can't be linked to me for data harvesting that easily.
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 wish CBC would host their own Mastodon server.