We waited for 2 hours to find a tank for Gnomeregan today on a sunday afternoon, and there were no lfg from anyone for other low/mid instances except one wailing caverns.
We tried to queue for WSG meanwhile as it’s WSG weekend and nto a single WSG formed below 60 for about 4 hours (we stopped looking then), did Blizzard just disable those?
I just came to this classic server from another … “SERVER” because I wanted the official thing.
On my old SERVER there were loads of low/mid bracket WSG going on every day, with guilds dedicated to twinking and all, it was a blast. How is this official server so bad in comparison???
This isn’t fresh, so there will be a fraction of levelers vs max-level characters. On Ironforge, the Firemaw cluster has only 3700 active players for the EU Era Firemaw cluster. 1500 for Horde.
Most people are playing on Anniversary and/or are preparing for TBC (21K on Spineshatter PvP, 13K on Thunderstrike PvE).
We just have to wait for the release of TBC and firemaw should theoretically rise from the ashes.
Firemaw is not a “real” server. It is a half-dead artificially created museum realm. 95% of people playing Vanilla are on the freshly created progression Anniversary servers. If you want to find groups you should go there
But as I understand, anniversary will become TBC. I don’t want to play TBC. it’s a stupid rep grind fest trash and makes all the cool vanilla special trinkets useless too (and trivializes old content, turning elites into normal mobs and similar trash dev ideas).
Rep grind is solved already - you just do dungeons and some other stuff, and as everyone else is also doing it there is plenty of groups. Class/spec meta is way more healthy, raiding is “cheaper” and less tedious. 
It is definitely alive, in the sense that you actually play classic. Yes, there are fewer players than on Anniversary, and you have to expect to look for 20-30 mins to find a dungeon while leveling. If you waited for 2 hours to find a tank for Gnomeregan, I’d say you’re exceptionally unlucky.
Looking at /who for brackets of 10 levels (10-19, 20-29 and so on), you will at most times find 50+ players. That’s actually quite good for “vanilla” standards, even on full realms there used to be fewer back then. To me, this more reasonably sized (for vanilla at least) population is part of the joy. I meet the same people and guilds, there is no layering, and it feels more classic-y to have to go the extra mile to find that last player 
We are all different, so if you don’t enjoy the more slow paced style of Era, it may not be the game mode for you. To me it’s just what I want.
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Then unfortunately you will never be able to find groups easily. Most people stop playing the moment new content stops arriving.
Your best bet is to wait for another launch, but even then you’ll only have a year before the project ends (if it’s seasonal) or naturally evolves into TBC (if it’s progression).
Wait until TBC Anniversary will launch. I’m pretty sure thousands of players will start playing Era at this point. Not everyone loves TBC.
People aren’t into MoP as well, yet a friend plays there, so people follow. ERA will be ERA until some new HC challenge hype or until the Anniversary ends/Classic+ announcement.
Firemaw is fine, you were just unlucky. It’s not like in Vanilla you could always find a group.