I'm sorry I'm late on this. I found the community that has real players. Check out https://www.q3a51.com/ - It has a list of the servers they run and a leaderboard.

Unfortunately it’s a really old game and only has a niche following. Most servers populate with bots these days.

To find humans you have to join a community that has active players. I remember finding one a while back but I can’t remember the name. They even had a website.

I’m not at my PC rn but when I get on I’ll see if they are in my history and then I’ll post a new comment with the name.

I play Q3A online every now and then and yeah, you're just going to find a lot of empty servers or ones populated with bots or ones with very few actual humans and I mean it's to be expected. it's a nearly 30 year old game. If you go on IRC on like Libera chat or quakenet you can get into some rooms that have decently active servers but i'm talking like maybe less than 5.

I only play with a few friends on private servers these days, and was never really good enough for online play. But just needed to show my love for Quake 3, and ioquake3 =] . Still an awesome game 27 years later!

Try Quake Live. It's very similar game but has more active players, I think.