If you walk downtown in some real world cities at night, you'd never know that millions of people could be living there. If you show up at a roleplay sim in the middle of the night (what I do because of my timezone), most people are going to be sleeping, so of course it's going to look empty. If you show up to a dance club after hours, you might never know that they just ran a 24 hour long event. That's because no one is there right now, but that doesn't mean it's abandoned. Now scale that example up to every single sim in SL. If you came to our group's sim at any other time, even missing us by 1 minute, you would never know that we are as active as we are. Add in my group, and we might only have a few hours worth of events in a given month, yet we have hundreds of members and regularly get dozens of attendees in the main group and a rotating group of about 15 people in mine. If the main group is going on a hike, they might only be at our sim for 30 minutes to coordinate what's going on. I hold twice monthly events that focus on different kinds of activities like campfire stories or craft building. The main group holds weekly events, many of which are hikes to other sims. There are two subgroups in it which operate at different times.
Whenever people ask about this kind of thing, this is what I say.
