[chillacy]

I wasn't around for this, but my understanding is that the community had a crisis and needed to rally around a new cause to exist, and that schism is called Raumism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raumism

The next question I suppose is: is esperanto culture worth being a part of?

It took me 3 months to learn esperanto (with duolingo), but there are a lot of benefits. Generally people are friendly and inviting, partly due to it's non-mainstream nature (consider behavior during the early days of the internet vs youtube comments now)

* It's a foreign language, and there are studies which link language acquisition with mental health (though I'm not sure how solid they are)

* It's an excuse to travel to cities worldwide where you might not go by yourself otherwise. I've found that solo travel at esperanto conferences is great.