I used this as an excuse to start a community, just so I could try to reproduce your problem. But, it actually worked for me on the first try, simply by using a single word without any special characters. Similar to your "pens" attempt. FWIW the only other field I filled in was the Display Name, for which I used the same word but starting with a capital letter. For Languages, I selected English.
drk
joined 1 year ago
This looks pretty cool, love that it's written in Rust and moreover that it runs on Linux. Definitely gonna try this.
Anyone else having trouble connecting to slrpnk.net? Both the site and the Lemmy instance (via Jerboa) seem unreachable.
edit: and it's back online