Naturally making players collide

There are a few post about the problem of space being to vast to find each other just by chance / not being able to effectively search for other players in pvp servers. Some suggested simply adding something that scans for other players in exchange for something expensive, but this seems a bit artificial to me. I'd like to offer a maybe more natural approach:

A kind of rumor system with the new economy npc factions. Everytime a player interacts with a npc faction they know something. E.g. a player comes to a trading post and does some business. Maybe the npc faction can tell another player the direction they came from and left to for a few credits (just record the position X seconds before/after passing the safe zone). Same with npc ships which might have seen a player on their journey and told their fellows in a trading outpost the spot the player in question was in antenna range of said npc ship.

Ore Hotspots. Again the different Factions might have differing knowledge on ore-rich asteroid fields/spots on the celestial bodies and might sell said knowledge in GPS-form for credits. Importantly these spots would need to be rare and concealed enough that on the one hand not every player faction just settles on their own spot and on the other hand to actually find them you'd need to get the info, thus increasing traffic at outposts. In terms of rarity I am thinking of the scale of maybe three in the space between and around a planet and its moon to make them actually contested. If further explored this might also make planet/moon to space and space to planet/moon transfer more prevalent. All in all it would maybe help the issue of the game world generally being pretty homogeneous with no reason to set up multiple bases apart or acting as merchant distributing wares as all are more or less available everywhere (if they are even needed). But I digress.