Also while there’s a modest amount of people here (I’d reserve small for under a thousand online, personally)

Honestly, I’d be curious how many active users we actually have. I wouldn’t be suprised if it was fewer than 1000 who contibute (including just voting) when excluding the authoritarian instances and spam.

Do any instances publish these stats?

Being honest, a lot of it probably is because Lemmy is so small. I’ve subscribed to basically every even vaguely relevant community to me, and I still only get about a half-dozen posts a day in my subscribed feed.