While there are communities around everything, there are some that I love.
I made some good friends and met my fiancee on an online community but I don’t go there any more. Some communities have a way of tiring. They’re best when you take breaks from them.
I’ve never really fitted in with some communities. The RPG community for example always seemed a little strange and alien and, as a result, I preferred to just blog on my lonesome rather than try to fit in with their arcane rules and preferences.`RPG.net, for example, is extremely bound by their little groups of mini-Hitlers. Anything you say that contains sarcasm or opinion is going to be vetted and you quickly find yourself labelled as “passive aggressive”. It’s a crapshoot however – like a mexican standoff where one or other person will get labelled first. As a result, I pretty much hate it there.
The Mac community is different however. Again I have some ownership over the area I spend my time in and that’s comfortable. What’s better is that there’s a very vibrant community in this little corner of the world and we do our best to moderate it in terms of keeping us legal (ie, no selling software illegally). To extend that, the friends I’ve made through owning Mac-Sys have created a community there. I’ve met, because of Mac-Sys, some savvy yet amiable businesspersons and been lucky enough to keep their friendship. I’ve also met some complete goits and I’m maintaining a list.
OSX-Nutters is a community I enjoy a lot when the Yanks aren’t whining about their own politics (which of course is the best thing to do rather than using their Constitutional rights to bear arms in the event of a corrupt government). The group started when a group of people from OmniGroup’s Mac OS X Talk mailing list needed somewhere to vent off-topic as well as keeping on-topic. Some of the humour and one-liners are just inspired.
The community I love, however, is my group of family and friends. You can see most of my friends on my FaceBook page and my family fill out the rest of it. That’s my community.