A very small number of people actually do used to in more numbers previously, but I've never heard anyone call themself Alt-lite. Even then calling them what they actually call themselves would be useful.
If you say so. The only people I've ever seen identify as such are either Spensner and the rest of the "no, I'm totally not a white supremacist, I'm.....this other thing that you've never heard of before" crowd, and trolls self-identifing as such in order to piss of leftists. IE, the "However,they all enjoy antagonizing and upsetting (\triggering") liberals and leftists, and use racist and otherwise oensive humor as a means to transgress what they describe as authoritarian boundaries set by the left-of-center." bunch the study was discussing, which it labeled alt-lite.
It's a shibboleth. It doesn't actually mean anything beyond "Well this person claims they're not a Nazi, but they're darned close..."
You could say that about Alt-Right as a label as well. No one sane actually identifies with it, and it's lost any meaning beyond a thinly veiled smear.
That's not quite what a shibboleth is. Shibboleth's are something that is used by people to signal affiliation or membership in a group, not to categorize other people in a group. For a modern example, responding to news or the words of others with just "yikes" is a thing that SJWs tend to do, or the right wing equivalent of summarizing anything from CNN as "orange man bad".
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