Hey all,

I have a server on 7dtd & I was wondering if any of you had some tips to gain active players. Anybody that joins my server play for around 10 minutes and then just leaves and never returns. Is this a common thing?

Yep, that would be common as your average "new" player joining a server is looking for 3 things:
Other players while on.
Total Server progress.
"Something different."

Normally your new players are going to be solo players, who are looking to either scum their way through so on a PvP server they're going to spend 10-20 minutes looking for easy to raid bases. Those players will wreck things then leave.

Your other solo player will be looking to play with other people. They'll spend 5-10 minutes on a server looking for other people, and probably leave after their first death if they've not encountered another person, or on a PvP server leave if their first death is at the hands of another player.

Sometimes you'll have a player who will notice it's day 120 or something, and those people who are expereinced at the game may tough it out for a full hour, maybe two. They're testing if the game is "dead" or at least goin on their own schedule. I'm a small example of that demographic, as I work night shift so usually when I'm on my days off I'm jumping on a server around 3 AM local time, so most servers I join are "dead" while I'm on. As I primarily like to play solo, this isn't a huge deal, but it does mean my base is hugely unprotected while I personally sleep, so not ideal.

The last thing you may have players popping on for though is just to look at the random seed you're using, see how the map is laid out, if it's interesting to them, or if there's a unique UI and mod combination going on. They're joining your server because they don't care about the other two things, but they're hoping to find something to make the game fun again.

At the end of the day, you'll have to realize two large hurdles for this particular game:
The first is that The Fun Pimps added multiplayer after a large amount of player feedback around alpha 5 (mid 2013 launch), they did it heavily under duress to stop the feedback demanding multiplayer. Here we are almost 8 years later, and the BULK of testing is still done in single player, with a "let them eat cake" mentality for things broken in MP. There was 3 alpha builds where minibikes would still dissapear in multiplayer due to the bike simply being an NPC that the player "chased" while giving the player a speed buff. If you crashed, the bike would be half a kilometer the direction you were traveling at the time of the crash.

The second thing you gotta make peace with is that you're hosting a server for a game that's been in Alpha status since 2013, and is widely considerd by most PvE and PvP players as a "dying game". This holiday it capped out at 39K active players worldwide, while on sale in places for more than 50% off, during in the middle of a global pandemic. If any setting would provide the game a push, it would have been that. And sadly all it saw over the last year was a growth of 2k players, and currently there's just shy of 13K severs reported by BattleMetrics, which is largely manual reporting. Meaning the number of active servers is quite possibly 2-3K above that. With just the reported servers, this leaves just over 3 players per server, for an average player saturation, and most of those servers by volume are small groups of friends, and families who want to play together.

So if you get 2-4 players to join your server, you're already beating the average server population.