Also, do yourself a favor and read the Inform Designer’s Manual, Edition 4. It’s dated (I think it came out in 1998) and pertains to Inform version 6, but it is still very relevant (modern Inform uses I6 under the hood), and it’s a lovely piece of technical writing.
Probably a reasonable overview of the community is the IF forum, intfiction.org. But there are many others.
A good overview of games written is ifdb.org and ifcomp.org. For example, https://ifdb.org/viewlist?id=k7rrytlz3wihmx2o
Things to search (include "interactive fiction" in each):
Tools: Inform, TADS, Dialog, Twine, Choicescript, Ink
People: Emily Short, Andrew Plotkin, Jon Ingold, Christine Love, Aaron Reed, Chris Crawford, Porpentine...there's so many.
Have fun!