How can I find other players in Elite: Dangerous?

The Elite: Dangerous galaxy is quite large, even if you only look at the areas populated by humans. If you're flying in areas that aren't popular, you could easily be in areas that haven't seen players in a long time. Your timezone and time of day could also effect it greatly.

I assume that you're already playing in Open, and know to look for hollow blips on your scanner.

Things you can do to increase your chances of running into other players:

• Read GalNet News, and go to where any Community Goals (CG) are. Both the station where you sign up for the CG, and any place that you can go to work on the CG will likely have many players.
• GalNet News will also sometimes hint at other types of things that will have a lot of players.
• Look at PowerPlay information. Any system that shows a lot of fortifying and/or undermining activity (visible as bar graphs) will be busy.
• When you're in a station, look at the "Traffic Report" in the local news there. Note that it includes you, and that if you exit and enter the system more than once you'll be counted twice.
• If you hit Ctrl-B to view bandwidth, and you see that bandwidth jumps up above 1000B/s while you're flying around, you're in an instance with at least one other player. Even if you can't see them on your scanner, they're probably around somewhere.
• When you do see other players in the game, ask them where places that are busy are.
• Look up "Rares Trade Routes" and go to the systems with rares in them. Those attract both traders and pirates.
• Go to the starter systems area (LHS 3447, Eravate). You'll find new players in the Sidewinder starter ship there. You may also find experienced players looking to either help out new players or to kill some new players.
• Go to the "Old Worlds" cluster (Leesti, Lave, Zaonce, etc). This is the area that people started the original 1984 game in. There's a number of rare commodities available in the area, and multiple active player groups active in the area.
• Look for information elsewhere (community.elitedangerous.com, reddit, forums, facebook groups, random googling) for information about events in the game that have a lot of players. Here's a guide to a bunch of the reddit groups for E:D: https://www.reddit.com/r/EliteDangerous/wiki/subreddits
• Look in those same places for info about player groups. Sometimes their headquarters or active area will be publicly visible on their website. Sometimes they will post about events they're doing. Or you can sign up to join their group. Often people in a group when using reddit or other forums will have a name, tag or signature that mentions their group name and you can google that.