Hello @culturelanguage! This is @traciyork from the @ocd (Original Content Decentralized) curation team. We noticed you shared your first post here on Hive and introduced yourself to the community - congratulations and welcome! So, where do you live and what do you look like... rereads post oh, sorry - never mind! 🤣
Speaking of community, we have many different ones here on the blockchain, devoted to all kinds of interests. Here's a link so you can check them all out - Hive Communities. Yes, the GEMS community is popular, and I think you'll also enjoy checking these out as well -
Liberty & Freedom (a bit quiet at the moment, but I know the mod @trostparadox is very active in a number of Hive communities & initiatives).
Also, as Hive can sometimes be quite confusing, the newly launched Newbies Guide is a growing repository of useful and easy to understand posts about how the Hive ecosystem works. For instance, there's a post in the collection called 3 things Newbies should do in their first week on Hive that you might find helpful (you've already got the powering up covered, and you can skip the "verify identity" bit...😉😆 ).
Please be aware that Hive is a bit different from other social media platforms since you are monetizing your blog, so it is important not to include content that you don't own without sources (and it shouldn't exceed 50% of the post). For more information, check this post - Why and How People Abuse and Plagiarise by hivewatchers.
If you have questions, feel free to hop into the OCD Discord server and we'll do our best to answer them, and again welcome to Hive!
Thank you, Traci (@traciyork)! for all this useful stuff! In fact, the protection from abusers, spammers and plagiarist is what made us decide to share our thoughts here.