It's not a waste of time if you enjoy it and are learning something from it without any unrealistic expectations about where it might lead. I agree with you that there isn't any shortage of so called memory safe languages (if by that you mean languages in which storage management is outside the programmer's control), so if you're interested attracting a community, I'd suggest focusing on something that other languages don't do well and also floats your boat. Is concurrent distributed processing solved to your satisfaction? How about parser generation? Are there any math or graphics libraries, web APIs, or low level protocols that deserve to be accessible to more programmers without specialized knowledge? Can you make monads comprehensible? One of these might be the killer feature that gets people on board.

Keep going, finish the project, publish it on Github and then post back here so anyone interested can go and have a look.

It may become popular or it might end up with a single programmer. It doesn't matter. Just do it!