Sanguine Maybe most of those users simply use FreeFlarum to test the forum functionality and then leave.
Communities are hard to build, you can get new users with many strategies, but the most powerful and simple one is not available in Flarum, SEO. The probability of success of a public community without minimum quality requirements, is very low. Private communities are another different story.
My personal experience, if it helps, is the next. In the forum of my project there are over 150 discussions and five registered users, of which only 3 are active, but over 50 daily visits are exceeded. It is true that it is the first time that I try to create a public community and that I do not have the experience to get active users, but it is something that I hope will improve over time. At least, the quality contents gives me visits (from Google). But the contents are not motivating the registration and participation of new users. It's something that i have to change and improve.
The simplest part of building a community is to install and configure the forum system. The really difficult thing is to get that community to move forward. I would like to know how many of the users that created a forum in FreeFlarum have analyzed the feasibility of their project and detailed the content and promotion strategy. Surely none.
Honestly, if i have to build a community for a serious project, i never choose a free hosting. Even so, I think that FreeFlarum can be a good option to create small communities quickly but nowadays Discord and other messaging apps win.
