Even if you start off with nothing at all, you can slowly start catching Pokemon and leveling yourself up, because the server optionally offers you basic things like 5 Pokeballs every 2 hours, as well as daily kits containing a handful of goodies. The server community is very nice (if a bit ravenous and grabby) and, thanks to the various plugins they have, it’s not too hard to actually catch Pokemon.
Lately, I’ve been playing on a very nice multiplayer Pixelmon server that recently upgraded to version 7.0.1 of Pixelmon Reforged, bringing with it all the Pokemon from the Alolan region, Z-Moves and more.