Communities - a must for everyone!

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Communities are important for everyone, not just minnows. But when you're first starting out, it's definitely a must to join at least 1 community where you can meet new people, make new friends, share experiences, life lessons, and more.

What is a community?

A community is a condition of sharing or having certain attitudes and interests in common with other people. Good thing you have Steemit in common when you join a Steemit community.

A community is basically a group of people doing, enjoying a particular thing.

What can a community gain from me?

Don't run away from the post just yet. I know how it feels to be a minnow, because I am a minnow myself.
If you're thinking that a community can't benefit from you because your vote is worth 0.00$ or just a couple of cents, then you are wrong.

You can benefit it by writing posts to bring more people into the community, resteeming valuable community work, suggesting ideas, helping people with the skills or experience you have.
If you want to succeed you have to interact. Talk to people. Offer free services you can provide with your skill set. Be positive, be good, stop scammers and exploiters for the sake of the whole little universe of ours. But, most importantly, be honest. Be yourself.

How can a community benefit me?

1. Free upvote service - some communities have a free upvote service usually with a 24 hour cooldown, this is extremely good for minnows that didn't get the hang of things around here yet and that couple of cents do matter.

With that said if you have 10+ dollars on every single post, PLEASE do not use these services as you are depleting the pool for minnows who lack knowledge to get involved truly on this wonderful platform, and those couple of cents boost their moral.

1. Post promotion - some even post promotion rules where you need to upvote 2 latest posts in the channel in order to promote your own.

2. General chat - this is what all communities have in common, the channel where miracles happen and people who wouldn't otherwise meet end up being best friends. 2 parts of the world mean nothing here.

Where can I find these communities?

I'm glad you asked.

Minnow Support Project (MSP)

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This is my #1 community when you're starting out. It's been a tremendous moral boost and people in it are the nicest, it was also my very first community, also the one that made me download discord, if you don't mind a stranger dropping by in your DM's then you must join this community.

As stated on MSP website

The Minnow Support Project is a Witness initiative designed to form a community around new Steemit users to help them grow, find support, and as an avenue toward financial success.
The Minnow Support Project is the largest off chain social network for the Steemit community. With over 12 000 unique members, you're able to build a network who'll stay with you from minnowhood to whalehood.
Joining Steemit is brutal, you are bombed with information you didn't know could be possible. It can be very easy to get lost and quit before you even started. This is where this community steps in. Come for the bots... stay for the community!
By joining the carefully structured MSP community, users will find the help to prosper by writing better articles, reaching a wider audience, connecting with others, and increasing their wealth and influence on Steemit.

As stated in The Spirit of MSP:

The Minnow Support Project aims to change the world. By our voluntary choice to engage in this community and strive for everyday living with responsibility, joy, and service to ourselves, one another, and our charter.

Whether engaging in a spirited Discord or Blockchain discussion, working on our projects, hosting a radio show, or just chilling in the pond we live each day deliberately with an eye toward connecting the individual to a larger community.

I asked @r0nd0n how did PALnet start. The response was:

@aggroed started PAL, and it actually started with his resteem contest he made with the account @minnowsupport
He got ahold of a discord vote bot from inertia, managed to get a bunch of huge delegations, and it snowballed from there to a 12k member server

I also asked about his mission/initiative.

I run a 24/7 streaming network named @msp-waves and an opinion flag neutralization service named @freezepeach. Freezepeach tries to improve retention by neutralizing demonitization, and MSP Waves has about 24 live shows with hosts and DJs from around the world.

As for PALnet's initiative, it's helping new users thrive, curate, get involved in contests, meet other amazing people, develop in the right direction. The primary goals are to spread the values of Peace, Abundance, and Liberty, to help Steemit Grow, and to train and retain minnows on the platform.

Seek help with no shame or just chat with wonderful people in the general chat on their PALnet discord server.

Check out @minnowsupport and follow for minnow support and help on Steemit!

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Busy project

I love busy because there are no more scenarios with 10 tabs open, also there is 12-hour cooldown free upvote service using the tag 'busy'. For a newborn steemian that is a very big morale boost to keep doing what you do until you improve the quality of your content.

Busy is a non-profit organization with open-source projects on Steem, which aims to give value back to people.
It's basically a place where fellow steemians can go to if they don't want to use 3rd party apps to bookmark posts or having to go on https://steemd.com/@username (replace username with your Steemit username) to see activity.

When you write posts on busy, they appear on Steemmit, and when you do the opposite, write posts on Steemit, they appear on busy.

How it started

As stated here: Founded by @ekitcho and @fabien in July, 2016, next-gen content creation social media platform based on the Steem Blockchain.

But it's also YOU !
As a decentralized and open source platform in the form of a non-profit organization, we are open to any contribution/suggestion from you. We would love to get the finest resources from this brilliant community to build the best platform ever that can change the world. Our goal is to be able to select and pay every contribution that brings value to Busy. Since the first day, we’ve paid every contributor! At the very beginning with our own money and later on with the support from @smooth, @cass, and then Steemit.Inc. (a Big thanks to them)
We're enthusiastically looking for talented people who understand where Busy is going.

Their mission/initiative

As stated here:

Our goal is to connect billions of people to the best social network platform that can bring value back to the people in a peer-to-peer and decentralized way using the power of the Steem blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Artists and User-generated content create billions dollars worth of value absorbed by the shareholders of these intermediaries and centralized services.
As a non-profit and decentralized organization, Busy provides the power of cryptocurrency and blockchain innovations within a platform that returns much of its value to the creators ensuring fair compensation.

Uber or Airbnb are often described as the sharing economy, a beautiful notion that peers create and share in value. But these businesses have little to do with sharing, they in fact only aggregate as middlemen through their centralized, proprietary platforms and do resell by taking huge commissions.
Today's big disrupters are about to get disrupted! Busy aims to create a true peer-to-peer sharing economy without middlemen and zero transaction fees that allows people to transact safely and freely.

Busy.org is basically Steemit, definitely give it a try!

Read more about the busy project here

Check out @busy.org on Steemit and follow to stay updated on the project.

Meet fellow busy people (pun intended) on busy discord server.

OCD

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Creating content can't be perfect and you should always thrive to improve the quality of your posts. But what happens when you put hours and hours in post after post and nobody notices you? OCD got you covered. OCD is like a curation group of manual curators looking for newcomers and authors that haven't received much support for their original and quality content.

As stated here:

@ocd was started with the intent to discover undervalued, under-appreciated Steemit gems from across the Steemiverse, and provide them a platform to rise and shine.

Visit @ocd on Steemit and follow for daily issues of quality content creators.
Visit @acidyo - the creator of ocd!

What does ocd do as stated here:

We have over 35 curators both for english and over 10 other languages looking at posts age 0-5 days that have gone missed by most curators and have remained undervalued. We ask these authors to be nominated in our compilation posts which offers them more attention from our 3000+ followers and then the @ocd account, the curator nominating it, myself and @anomadsoul reward the post with votes.

We also re-steem posts that have been tagged with #ocd-resteem and will be growing the amount of daily re-steems in the near future.
The curated posts receive 2-2.5x higher votes than the curators who found them get rewarded.

Vote on ocd posts, resteemed posts and help the undervalued users become valued.
OCD also has a tag! A tag for undervalued quality posts.
Use the tag 'ocd-resteem' for original, creative work in order to get a resteem from the @ocd account.

Please do not use the tag if 50% of your posts make over 20$ because you are depleting the pool for original, quality, talented content creators who don't earn as many rewards.

As stated here:

Success on Steemit requires a combination of many things - Creating kickass original content is key, but your content getting discovered as well as you engaging with like-minded individuals are other important parameters.

And we aim to help those in need of help - in the process, allowing their content to be discovered and valued.

The Alliance

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The alliance is a community like no other, you submit an application and your content will be reviewed, some will satisfy the terms and some will have to be rejected. But don't hold a grudge if you get rejected. I got rejected and I got the best rejection I ever got, rejection full of information how to improve my content and a fellow steemian to talk to if I have troubles with some aspects of creating content.

If your application has been accepted you proceed to let's say 'student' phase and since I haven't submitted another application yet, it's still a mystery for me on what's going on there.

If you want to find out go to The Admission Office on discord and submit an application! Although, I suggest firstly reading their post where you will find out more about who they are and what they do.

I asked @enginewitty How did the alliance start and what is its mission/initiative.
His response:

#thealliance notion was birthed by new witness @enginewitty in late June of last year. Seeing that a team would be necessary to effectively grow on Steemit, he sought one out. It initially started on Facebook and has since migrated completely to Steemit with Discord being its communication hub. The mission itself has evolved. The primary objective now is to foster the growth of the quality content creators and curators within the family. New members are always considered. Have them read that post for more information.

They also have their tag, not a free upvote service like the rest of communities but the tag for alliance to find all the members posts.
As stated here:

#thealliance tag is very useful to keep track of allied posts and give credit where credit is due. I'm sure there are some great posts from our family that didn't use our tag

How to join and more information about the alliance can be found here

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The Dolphin Cocoon Project

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I haven't reached the growth of dolphin yet, but I feel for you guys. It can be frustrating knowing you're left out because whales mostly don't need help and minnows have a range of options to choose from.
It took some time and effort, maybe money to get to where you are and now you're swimming with your friend or two and wonder where is everyone?

When I asked @SirCork how The Dolphin Cocoon project started, he told me:

The Dolphin Cocoon was founded by @PoeticSnake to foster a community for the users in between being minnows, which are everyone's focus for support, and whales, which don't need support. The Dolphin Cocoon is a safe harbor for those of us in the middle class, with reps over 50 or wallets over about $5K in value, more or less, with some exceptions for notable up and comers of notoriety who will obviously dolphin up soon or whales who are kind to our cause.

So we formed a community, I believe I was member #2 after Snekky, and we set it up and called our networks of dolphins in.
It grew and we support each other, form new friendships, and commune in dolphin sized goodness.
There are some good conversations, some good post sharing opportunities, the occasional contests, and well, peers.

Check them out -> @thedolphincocoon and follow for growing and sharing the Dolphin love among the platform.

If you want to find fellow dolphins feel free to join The Dolphin Cocoon discord channel.

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The STEEM Engine

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As stated in [Introduction of The STEEM Engine](Introducing The STEEM Engine):

Engineered by @ethandsmith, @HopeHuggs, @catweasel, @enchantedspirit, and @apanamamama, The STEEM Engine is a Discord group community of hard-working Steemians. The main focus of the group is to provide quality engagement across its members' posts.

The STEEM Engine is looking for great new passengers to come aboard.
There are no specific categorical, age, or reputation requirements to join, but they do ask that you have at least three or four blog posts of your own so they can get an idea of your writing style and interests.

Please note: This is an English-speaking group. We need your posts to be written in excellent English ... or bilingual with an English version of your text.

if you're an artist, a writer, a programmer, a cryptocurrency guru, or otherwise creative soul feel free to join The STEEM Engine discord server.

The community strives to help new users get oriented, or help seasoned users find a new niche.
Their main goal is to promote engagement and interaction among its members to encourage the creation of fantastic content across all topics on Steemit.

Check them out -> @thesteemengine and follow for curation posts that feature the best of their members' content.

More information about how to get aboard is here

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Steem Music Alliance

Picture obtained from @chiefmappster

If you have passion for music this is where you will fit in perfectly.

I asked @chiefmappster how did Steem Music Alliance start and what's their mission/initiative. His response:

It started as a progression of the Steemit Music League which is a community with the goal of providing the most feedback, recognition, and rewards, while bringing Steemians together.
@seveaux , @macchiata , and myself came together to create an avenue where Steemians with a passion in music can come, interact, find other talent for music, and have a home in this Steemit world. The mission is to bring people together and help Steemians with passions and dreams in music to reach their potential.

Enjoy some Steem Music Alliance tunes on soundcloud while chatting with fellow musicians!

Feel the melody with fellow musicians on Steem Music Alliance discord channel.

The Writers block

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If you enjoy writing, doesn't matter what genre, fiction, non-fiction, poetry, songwriting. It is all available there aswell as an opportunity to submit your work in order to improve your writing skills.

As stated here:

Are you a writer or keen to learn? Do you wish to join a community of like-minded individuals who can help hone your writing skills in the fields of fiction, non-fiction, technical, poetry, or songwriting? Join us at The Writers' Block.

I asked @gmuxx how did The Writers' Block start and what is its mission/initiative?
His response:

The Writers' Block began life as the fiction workshop at the Minnow Support Project. We outgrew that space and decided to create our own server dedicated to all forms of writing. Our mission is to edit, critique and polish works of fiction, poetry, non-fiction, technical and songwriting before it is published to the blockchain.

As stated here:

Set up by @Rhondak, it offered a critique and editing service for writers of fiction. In September @GMuxx created The Writers' Block server where we stretched our legs and expanded into poetry, non-fiction, and songwriting workshops and created an English language channel.

If you have an idea for a story, but you can't interpret it, The Writers' Block is here to help with brainstorming and story developing.
If English is not your first language, get help with spelling and grammar in English Language channel where volunteers, ably led by @Lenadr, will surely help you!

If poetry is what gets you out of the bed you're definitely going to like the Poetry Workshop.
As stated here:

Do you enjoy writing poetry? Our Poetry Workshop allows you to type your poems straight into chat to receive feedback and suggestions from other members and the Poetry Editors, @sunravelme, @jrswab and @dbooster.
Community guidelines and rules can be found here.

If you're a songwriter @Uniwhisp runs this channel in much the same way as the Poetry Workshop. You can type your songs and verses straight into chat.
If non-fiction is what you love. Non - Fiction Workshop is led by @jasonbu and @anarcho-andrei and runs in much the same way as the Fiction Workshop.

For more information about The Writers' Block and how to submit your story to get constructive critique visit What can The Writers' Block offer you?

Editing services, brainstorming room, workshops, polishing your skills, meeting new people and making friends on The Writers' Block discord server!

Visit their website to find out how to join the Block!

Visit @thewritersblock on Steemit and follow for weekly updates!

Picture acquired on Discord from @gmuxx

Croatian Steemit Association

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As stated from @ivan.atman in Official Croatian Steemit Association Is Up:

There has been an increase in Croatian Steemit users in the past 6 months, roughly amounting to 130 users that are either fully active or are partially involved within the Steemit community, hence the decision to create a one place where we can all meet up to discuss about the Steemit, global decentralization, cryptocurrency and the benefits they all have in a gradual reformation of the monetary system and humanitarianism.

Reason why it is a good idea to promote Steemit and cryptocurrency in our country, is that it could potentially increase our stability in the future, for both the people who support decentralization and those who don't, because of the overflow of dynamic investments which will come from all sides, not only abusive oligarch elite that is buying our land for nothing by changing tax laws like they are now, but individual people and small decentralized companies, which will pay onto us and thus onto the country of Croatia, whilst currently investors buy and the money goes outside of the country due to the tax embezzlement

Live promotion, post promotion, chit-chat, organisation and meet up's and the Croatian Steemfest is all being discussed in Croatian Steemit Association discord server.

Find out more about this project.

Special thanks to everyone who allowed me to use the pictures, write about their community and helped me in writing about their communities.

Conclusion

I want this post to serve as a place to go to choose a community for yourself when you get overwhelmed with information as a newcomer steemian. I will definitely edit the post as I explore and find new and old communities who are helpful to all people, not just minnows, but especially minnows.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment with your questions, either me or a fellow experienced steemian will answer!

Thank you for reading.

Stay positive and spread those good vibes!