Was doing some digging because I was bored and occasionally stumble back on wow classic for the pvp. The largest populated sever in all of modern wow is Area 52 which has 18k, 2nd is stormrage with 14k, third is Illidan with just under 14k population and 4th is Jubei’Thos with just over 10k per wowprogress.com, those are the only servers with over 10k active users currently there’s 3 servers with 9k, 1 with 8.8k, 2 with 7.6k. So on the top ten servers in modern there’s just under 109k active players, we can safely assume about 200k overall and being extremely generous maybe 250k.
In comparison per ironforge.pro numbers from 4/9/25 to 4/15/25, Classic SoD had 70k active users for what is basically wow vanilla plus. The 4 main servers have 24.5k, 22k, 12.5k and 10k population, again we see 4 servers with over 10k population. But that’s not all folks! WoW anniversary had 96k active users with the 4 main servers at 30k, 27.6k, 17k, and 16k, again 4 over 10k. And last but not least we have WoW classic cata which (at its lowest point currently) still has 111.7k active users. None of the servers in cata classic are over 10k however. What’s interesting is between the wow classic series there’s ~277.7k active users. Even with cross play overlap there still more activity on wow classic than current. This is even aside from Cata classic being in a lull until MoP releases in August.
Do you know of a single private servers that isn't run by trannies?
afaik there isn't a single WoW server where you can role-play as a racist paladin
Depends on what you're looking for, but if you're mostly looking for a nostalgia trip I'd just say spin up your own to start. There's a number of repacks out there that you can just download and run on your local machine and invite your friends onto it to play with you (or just play with bots which are probably about as competent as the average WoW player - they do decently on rotations but are pretty bad at "don't stand in the fire").
Obviously that doesn't work if you're looking to have a large, vibrant community though.
Finding the right repack then getting it to work then finding the bots and a database of all the old item codes and commands is a little harder. You would also need the right patches for the specific game version.
If you play classic cata it’s very fu woke.