Hey, I did the same thing recently! Set it up on my own server, and after a week, I'm starting to see new accounts being added to my explore feed. But there's no user count.
It's an annoying experience and I'm not fully sure how to resolve it yet, nor have I dung into it.
I published it to the internet and the next day, I couldn't ssh into the server anymore with my user account and something was off.
Tried root + password, also failed.
Immediately facepalmed because the password was the generic 8 characters and there was no fail2ban to stop guessing.