I want to actively build community and engage with people here; to make this place home. That's how it changed me. I'm not a lurker or passive. It has made positive improvements to my reading and cooking, along with bending my language more positively. I've also further grown in my appreciation of diversity.
That was the key for me. To take one of my favorite communities ("bande dessinée," i.e. Euro comics) and create a version on Lemmy eight months ago. It's taken a load of work (usually daily), and sometimes I get really discouraged, but overall it locked me in to the FV.
Also, you might have to burn me at the stake for saying this-- I still visit Reddit because of the far more prolific content, and do have worries & reservations about the tankie founders of Lemmy. But so far, so good. The more the FV grows, the more I'll have no problem leaving Reddit behind.
As far as fermentation, I don't even recall what prompted me now. I mostly watch the All feed so I catch what most of Lemmy is doing. It may have been... in fact... I think it was something I was discussing with my offline AI. That is not a valid primary reference source, but searching online helped. That lead to asking questions here, and resulted in more confidence.
On my Beehaw account and their food community I asked about how people cook rice back when I was developing my recipe and working on ways of altering cooked grain texture. Someone there mentioned making a sauce for topping fried rice using spicy mayo and teriyaki sauces. That one was a game changer for me and really pushed me into playing with sauces. That got me thinking about fermented sauces because adding Worcestershire sauce to that spicy mayo/teriyaki blend makes it even better. This is what I am exploring now. I want to play with unique flavors by wild exploration.
That is just how my intuitively driven mind works. I attribute inspiration to a root fork in my thinking, but I don't really "follow" anything. I haven't cooked something with a recipe and measuring in 10 years or more. It is the motivation to explore an new space, and just enough reinforcing motivation to help me take action that I value. I didn't expect a place this small to have many people experienced in fermentation, but I was pleasantly surprised. In other words, my investment into engaging paid off even in a relatively small niche subject.