but I must admit I still don’t participate here as much because the content I’m seeing it’s not as tailored to my interests as I’d like. Searching for communities tends to show a lot of communities with no participation at all, which is useless

yeah that’s the unfortunate thing about a smaller site! but the onus is on all of us to start participating, so even if you see an empty community, just post something in there!

would prefer free market solns where the state has to abide by the rules of the people

you mean like facebook? haha!