GalCiv3 Forums
I started out with BBSes back in the 80s. Fidonet and Usenet in the 90s. Forums and later Reddit.
My first BBS was for the Commodore 64.
Where did you start?
BBSes in 91-97 starting on an 8086 and 1200 baud, Ran my own BBS in 92-97, Fidonet 93ish-97 (1:15/42,) and some other QWK networks, #OS/2 Undernet starting about 1995-1999, I actually probably talked to Brad once during that because we ran an AMA sort of thing for Stardock once there. Forums heavily from 1998-2012 or so, and now I'm dabbling in Pleroma/Mastodon/Discord.
My first computer was actually 1986 and Atari 8-bit, but I didn't get into BBSes until much later.
33.6 dialup at $2 per hour ....got 'expensive' by the time I was Admin here at Wincustomize...SP2 for XP took 8 hours to download...;)
First community interaction was via Customize.org and Skinz.org....with #skinners etc on IRC ...;)
I think my earliest community experience was a combination of Gamespy servers, usermade forums for different clans I joined and of course the old MSN service which was more popular here in Europe than America oddly. I also did IRC off and on for awhile. It was actually through one of the last IRC servers I was a part of where I learned about Discord a few years back.
Something I really miss even today was a lot of the old community servers for Team Fortress 2 I would play on. Before the game went free 2 play those places really felt like family sometimes. You got to know everyone on voice and text chat even as you fragged one another.
Much the same. I started in the 80's as well with BBS using CP/M and some C64. Then Fidonet and Compuserve. I loved Usenet before forums and eventually reddit took off. Although, Compuserve was my go to location for the chat and message forums as a developer. I thought it was a little expensive in the day but fortunately my work paid for it.
Here in 2007 at triple t hotspot with my first labtop. I was old-school where computers didn't need the internet. I registered dark avatar didn't regularly get on untill 2008 where I had dial up, and a friend of mine in the military made me get on Facebook.
Usenet in the 90s, Stardock forums as soon as they came along. However my company had an international network as far back as the late 70s and I used their equivalent of forums back then if you want to count that.
Wincustomize Forums definitely. -Finally "a topic" that was interesting. 
Actually contributing to a community, probably Usenet in the mid 90s, then Kali (the game matching service / chat program) around 97 or so.
Kali was great, I used the OS/2 version and played Descent and a few other games on it.
I would say this online community back in 2006. GalCiv 2 forums to be specific. This was after I made an account to update my game. I absorbed just about everything thing there was to know about Galciv 2. Then I got involved.
ditto..... April '04 to be precise....
AOL, in 1983 after getting my first Apple IIe (2 5.25 floppy disc units - 2!). The nut on that job was north of $2k, a boatload of money (even now), and the entire computer I'm using to post this is half the size of the floppy box alone, not to mention a third of the price. Crazy.
Didn't really participate in any online communities until WC in 2001 & JU in 2004.
Battle.net on my 166mz with dialup. In like 99 when I was 10. Starcraft for the win.
Several years back, learning that you'd started in BBS-land made lots of aspects of Stardock fora 'click' for me. The bandwidth back then was, um, laughable in comparison and the world appeared monochrome, but it was somehow more exciting and. And it was easier, at least for me, to find spaces where the moderators were active and focused on free but civil discussion.
I'm going to go with GameFAQs in the '90s.
From there it was a variety of gaming forums. Some of those were created and managed by me and a couple of friends. Then on to Reddit!
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