@OP
If the question is to play with friends or rely on the community then that may end badly.

Solo is quite doable but it does take work and probably normal people would see it as repetitive. I enjoy the exploration and logistics of it and that gets me through the tree cutting, ore mining and farming needed to progress. But don't kid yourself there is a lot of that going on.

Increasing the people increases the work but many hands can divide up jobs... don't want to be the poor guy farming for 10 people while others are out exploring and having fun.

The thing is this isn't an MMO where you join public servers hosted by the dev. Players host or rent servers and run with friends on typically passworded servers. If left open any player could join your world and destroy what you built and steal resources just for laughs.. so people tend not to let strangers in unless they don't care or want to learn the hard way.

The way to join others is in "looking for groups" sub forum or I guess discord? I have only played with friends on steam, but most of my time is solo.