Heh, I am pretty deep embedded in the Esperanto community. I have started 18 years ago and during that time made a lot of friends, some enemies, some love partners (really, we talk together in Esperanto!). In fact, I have founded a nonprofit nongovernmental organisation that support volunteers to write better Wikipedia in Esperanto - and I love the work and it even pays me sometimes. And because of my activities, I have travel around the planet. I live in Europe, and once I have traveled in one month to Seoul, South Korea and Benin and Togo in Africa to Esperanto meetings. That was crazy! During that month I have fulfilled my 2 childhood dreams - to climb a bamboo and to eat a sugar cane ;-)

So, yeah, it enriched my life pretty drastically. I would say that the the biggest long term benefit that I get was wast widening of my horizons. The world became “smaller” for me / more of it became “my home” and I have become more “world citizen”. It may sound cheese but it feels great :-)

There are many local groups over the planet, some event practically every day, many Telegram groups with pretty active community. On Lemmy, there is mostly !esperanto@sopuli.xyz