More than a year ago, I joined a tilde community. It's not the first pubnix for me, but I don't think a tilde community is quite the same thing. Maybe all pubnix is a community too?
The approval time took a while, which is to be expected when it's only one person handling the applications. But by the time I got accepted and invited, the majority of my interest had waned.
Recently, I've revived one of my older tablets. It works fine, a little slow, but the portability and still having a screen bigger than a smartphone made it really nice to have around the house. The fact that it's a little slow does make using some websites hellish. Eventually that led me to revisiting the gemini protocol. One thing led to another and it got me interested in actually visiting the tilde pubnix/community I joined.
A bit of poking around and I joined the internal IRC server. There was some conversation and instead of getting to just lurk, I was greeted!
It's not that I haven't been greeted in the past whenever I join a chatroom but I think by this point, I was already primed to like the community and the space. Being greeted, as a complete stranger, by those who were in active conversation, was "the final straw," but positive!
I do have a tendency to drift away from communities too, so we'll see how this pans out.
Also, I may consider exporting this blog and hosting it myself, so I can have a gemini capsule version of it. I want more content in geminispace!