i cant seem to get random players when playing on public

ive been playing Fortnite since it released on Xbox (since before the battle royale dropped, back when they were telling us they were going to add an open world PvE mode) and id been soloing it almost exclusively, until i finally got some friends to play (took way too long), so i thought "why not put my privacy to public, it would make things way easier"… thats when i figured out that i cant be matched with random players basically at all, i have my settings set to public and NAE server

my only guess is because im base level 48 and account level 136, that im too high a level to be matched with people, like the player pool i get slotted into has almost no one playing in it, and none of them play on public or something

like even when i click the "Play with others" on the map, i never connect, it either just infinitely loads, or throws me into a random mission alone