I remember #makr.io. Within days after it was announced, I requested an account, found it dissatisfying, closed my account. In many ways, I thought it would have been better as "makrcities", without any (known) relationship to #Diaspora.
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I later felt bad about how negative my reaction had been. They tried hard to shed the unsatisfiable demands of D*'s users, but those same users were their original userbase, and thus really critical of the site's centralization.