As someone who only ever rely on friends to play my servers, I've said this so many times over the years to people, the best way to maintain some decent popularity is if people had more stuff that's actually interesting to host, and I don't mean just snatching something off of blockland glass or the forums, or going to someone's github hosting conans jailbreak, like actually take the time to work on something for a change. Even if it's a similar formula or something completely new, and have some kind of consistent schedule for hosting. It'll give people a reason to look forward to playing every so often rather then just wake up and see an empty server list regardless of the timezone. It's hard for me to say I've really done much recently because I still have my hands full on a couple of projects but I'm trying at the very least, I can't say the same for others who just complain the game is dying but literally won't take the time to try making something with the endless amount of resources that people have made for the last decade.
The reason I suggest hosting something new will do the trick is I've seen so many old users return on a rare occasion, either on my server or someone elses many times, but once they see nothing of interest is really about and it's only maybe one or two servers that caught their eye, they go back to whatever it is they were doing before and the game is left to gain dust again. People do commonly make returns but they wont stay if there's no reason to.
