Donations are needed for good servers to survive. Money doesn't just appear out of thin air, and if you get a successful server, it costs a ton. People always think of cost as in with money, but truth is, time is a cost as well. Successful servers not only cost in money, but they cost time too. I run many successful servers (not all in Minecraft) and server costs run about $155 per month, or more. I also have sports and school that I need to do too, and that takes time, so for people like me who do this alongside school and sports, time is a real bottleneck. I've also found that there are two main parts to succeeding in this, feature and community. So, you saying about how could you ever feel like a part of a large server or whatever, is because you don't put yourself in there to be a part of it. If servers had no community, the people who play it wouldn't talk with each other and the server would fall apart.
