No it isn't. It's undergoing a healthy pruning. Pruning can be overdone, but that hasn't happened at FR yet. It only feels like death to the branches and twigs that are pruned. And there is life after pruning. The recently pruned have all gone to join different Internet groups where they are among folks just like themselves.
One website is a mass Rudy rally all day every day. Some other former FReepers, who have an exalted opinion of their own feeble, haphazard intelligence and who share a devout quasi-religious commitment to materialist fundamentalism, are clustered over over at another website where they can stroke each other into a state of blithering delirium.
Both of those sites comprise far narrower communities in an ideological sense than the FR community. They complain that FR has become rigid, intolerant, and ultra-orthodox but they completely overlook the smothering sameness and homogeneity of their own tiny groups.
The truth is, you can still find a wider range of opinions at FR than at any other comparable political website--especially alternate websites set up by disgruntled former FReepers. Jim Robinson has taken prudent measures to reorient FR to its original bearings that has required a handful of bannings.
That's healthy. Very healthy.
Good writing. Feels like some healing has already begun.
I hope your predictions/analyses are correct.
E.V., thanks for the drive-by psychoanalysis, you have shone a light on my hidden sadness. I shall get myself some happy pills forthwith. titter