Sure feels like it. I've seen countless low effort propaganda posts from Throwaway and their complaints anytime critical thought enters the discussion.
This community doesn't appear abandoned, it just isn't a locked down echo chamber like r/conservative on reddit, the place where users are banned, posts are locked to specific users, and topics which go against the narrative are taboo. That's straight up unhealthy, unproductive, and dangerous. We can do better here.
Full disclosure: I am not a conservative myself but I appreciate an open community which doesn't shut out discussion.
No, its up, its just that federation is kinda hard.
I chose lemm.ee because thats my home instance, and that keeps federation issues to a minimum. Plus its a pretty big instance and it seems to have chill admins.