currently with the donations that im getting the participation will just not be worth it.
Pretty much what causes the smaller communities to die out. Either no curation efforts that encourage posting in them, or the people that run them struggle to encourage posting in them because there's little to no incentive. My own community suffers from this, I'd run more contests and happily throw out a financial reward but there's just no attention. I'm not throwing out my own money into this when my own posts often barely make more than $3.
So yeah, I fully understand it!