Define "totally dead"? A lot of big servers I've looked at (Fosstodon, social.coop, mastodon.social, etc.) seem very active. Also, "dead" may have to be defined differently in a federated world where it will in fact be quite common (probably even the majority of servers) to have 2 users on an instance that are active, but of course most activity is through federation so the service itself may look like it just has a few posts a day.
