Asklemmy

I've been getting into primitive technology lately. It all started when I looked at my back yard and thought hey, if we call it red clay, then I should be able to make it into pottery. I take dirt from my yard, levigate it, add grog and wedge, hand-build pots, and fire them in my fire pit. Been making sharpening stones from river rocks. Crafting replicas of Roman machines. That sort of thing.

I have a very dangerous and lame hobby.

I forage for food. It's a lot of fun trying new things. But it's also really dangerous if you don't know what you are doing.

If you want to do this hobby safely start small. Identify plants in your own yard/park exct. I use an app called plant net, Wikipedia, duckduckgo, Google Earth, foraging sites, to find out where to go. Knowledge of when they grow and what condions they like helps.

Being 100% sure on what you are going to eat is a life and death choice. When in doubt, throw it out.

Feel free to ask me anything if you have questions.

you'd be shocked at how easy it is to grow most edible mushrooms. all you need to grow oysters is a syringe full of spores and some uncle bens pre-cooked vacuum sealed rice. If you want to do lion's mane or other more complex growing cycles like that, just add a rubbermade tub half full of vermiculite and coconut coir. You can be in this hobby for like $100 up front and then like $30/batch. And yes you can grow those mushrooms, where legal of course. I haven't tried it but it seems to be no more difficult than the ones I've successfully grown, and the rice trick actually comes from that community (google "uncle ben tek" for more info)

Making custom home automations with Home Assistant. Sure, a lot of it is unnecessary but it sure is a lot of fun.

I'm a semi-secretive LARPer. I pack my stuff at night, don't talk to my coworkers about it, and just go about my life as if I don't.

I've found people are pretty judgy about it, so I just don't mention that I enjoy getting into a neat costume, playing some little mini-games, having a drink or six, camping, and (most importantly) seeing my friends once a month in a structured activity.

It's fun stuff if you find the right group. That last part is hard.

I've been on a hiatus due to some medical stuff making it hard for me to concentrate, but I'm a lock nerd. I collect cool locks ("cool" being very subjective here 😅) and pick / manipulate them.

edit: here's a tiny part of my collection. I'd upload more but I'm having a hard time with the mobile site and image uploads

Is 3D printing still niche? If so, 3D printing, otherwise nothing.

My niche hobby is self-hosting and running my own home computer lab. It's tons of fun. The only thing I miss about reddit is the community of self-hosters and home labbers.

I build guitar pedals! I don't design them, but I order the PCBs and solder the components myself. It's significantly cheaper than buying them premade, and how many people can say they made their own pedalboard?

I'm also an amateur Fossil Hunter. The area I live in is filled with fossils from the Ordovincian.

stealth camping. basically camping where your not supposed to / normally wouldn't want to, and have your presence remain unknown. it's great fun and breathed new life into "the outdoors" for me

The most niche thing I probably do (badly) is making chocolate. Not like, just tempering chocolate, but putting nibs and milk powder and sugar and cocoa butter in my countertop melanger and letting it work for like 24 hours until it's nice and smooth. I haven't really perfected it at all and my chocolate recipe is currently mediocre, and i need to experiment with better nibs and roasting them myself, but it's an interesting process that I enjoy.

Otherwise uh, IDK I do everything. I love cooking/baking, and most types of art, I'm huge into fabric arts like nuno felting and needle felting, embroidery is one of my absolute favorite things, I'm pretty decent at sewing, I also like to draw and I am really itching to get into sculpey jewelry crafting and maybe miniatures, I've dabbled in wire jewelry (meh at it), I built (with help) a coffee table where the top comes up so you can turn the base on its side to become a dining table, I'm sure there a bunch of stuff I'm forgetting... oh I guess I'm really good at laundry? I can get stains out of almost anything at this point.

Can’t believe I got all the way to the end and no one has posted about flight simming.

It’s an amazing hobby, with tonnes of gear, software, community and a wealth of knowledge. I’m nowhere in as deep as some, but find an immense pleasure in nerding out about it.

I was never worried about flying for real (as a passenger) but during turbulence I’d sometimes get a bit clammy-handed. Flight simming has completely cured it. There are SO many layers of safety and the more you understand - and in fact the more accident reports you read and see what the follow-up improvements were - the less I get bothered about even heavy turbulence or unsteady landings. Pilots know their stuff.

I guess blacksmithing would be considered niche? Not doing it very regular. But once every view months.

I'm really into calligraphy and snowboarding. Luckily there's a snowboarding presence here on lemmy, but I have not the time to start a calligraphy one.

Brickfilming! I make films with Lego using stop motion animation. Takes a lot of patience and my perfectionism is my worst enemy, but it's super rewarding, and there's a really cool community online around it. And yes, my profile picture is from my most recent Brickfilm!

Ham radio! It's relaxing. My favorite activity is to take my portable gear to parks and operate Parks on the Air.

Used to be sword fighting, but difficult after I got into an accident and can barely use my hand anymore...

I build various random number generators, and then use them in elaborate practical jokes.

Solid-state particle detectors, zener avalanche noise, etc. Many failed designs (or failed... So far).

Sometimes I put them in sinister looking cases. Sometimes behind an API. Sometimes I design a coffee maker that brews coffee in a quantum superposition of caffeination states.

I'm working on one that is a Lemmy bot. It won't be done particularly soon though.

Some of mine maybe aren't that niche anymore, but:

• Retro computing: no one needs more than 640k. Maybe no one needs more than 64k. Those old systems were the last time a single programmer could have control over the entire machine at a low level.

• Ham radio: Oftentimes called a dying hobby, but a great foray into electronics in general, and also a pretty nice community (save for a few curmudgeons).

• Analog audio: often thought of as a boutique thing, but really isn't. Lots of old equipment ready to be restored that can give you really unique auditory experiences.

• Plastic modeling: especially if you start from a kit but add things to it, or if you build from scratch, or hell, even if you just build a kit as intended, there is a huge amount of personal expression and creativity.

I like finding obscure media and curating playlists out of them. Weird old commercials, music videos, tv spots, instructional/training videos, short films and animation, old tv shows.

Some more niche than others but basically...making stuff. Cross stitch, yarn crafts, sewing, needle felting, dicemaking, 3d printing, very occasional cosplay, I'm about to try my first macrame kit and a friend is planning for us to learn punch needle together.

There's something just so satisfying about making real stuff you can use, or wear, or wash yourself with or whatever (I also briefly got into soapmaking).

If you want to chat about basically any craft (or just lurk and look at pretty projects, that's ok too), I've been keeping a megalist of relevant communities and magazines here https://lemm.ee/post/224890. And if anyone reading this runs a related one that should be on the list please DM me to be added!

Analogue photography but the films are expensive af.

I fly paramotors. Imagine a fan you strap on your back, a paraglider that goes overhead, and you run run run until you're airborne! Never fails to put a smile on my face when times are tough. And maintaining the engine and planning that next flight keeps me occupied when the weather doesn't cooperate.

I build custom mechanical keyboards. Got into it because of the Pandemic and now I have built 6 of them. /r/mk and /r/emk used to be some of my most visited subs on the other site. I'm now known as the goto for keyboard questions in my circles of friends.

I started getting into fidgeting more lately and took a liking to magnetic sliders and now have a few that I pretty much always have with me.

And that extended into me learning about begleri beads somehow so now I am attempting to learn that. I can do slips and 2 finger wraps and occasiaonal one finger or thumb wraps but not much else yet. I accidentally learned a stall because I messed up. I need to really learn transfers since that is one of the main things you do a lot of.

I think I am also amongst the hyperfixator group in this thread. I was previously into speedsolving Rubik's cubes and roasting coffee so I feel a lot of these answers lol.

I really love this thread. It's great to see people sharing things they enjoy!

I freeline skate and have recently gotten into surfskating as well. They're good fun and nice leg workouts. Don't ask me to do any tricks though, I say "I prefer to cruise around", but really I'm just too pleb for that stuff.

Really like most of the hobbies from comments, you guys are interesting!

Mine are (I'm not sure if they are niche but):

Fountain pens. Writing with them feels very nice and smooth and it's a little piece of "retro" even though I don't have time for any other kind of "retro"

Lucid dreaming. It's an exercise of control over your dreams and a chance of doing something you like when you sleep. Or experience something new. There are forums with quests like "go to an art gallery in a dream and explore what your brain can give you as a painting" or "build yourself a dream homebase with all your favorite pieces of dreams from childhood" or "jump into a chalk painting and describe your experience"

Yarn dyeing started as a hobby and turned into my job quite quickly :)

It's fun and satisfying to see the colours evolve on yarn and how the colours act differently depending on the fibre blend you're dyeing.

I love mapping on openstreetmap.org

Lockpicking. I’ve been a longtime watcher of content like the lockpicking lawyer so for Christmas I asked for a set of picks and tools from my wife. Ever since I just sit around and blindly fidget with old padlocks. You can get a decent starter set for $60 and a never ending supply of locks that have long since lost their keys.

I play an Irish sport called hurling and I am neither Irish nor I am in Ireland. So nobody knows this sport so I have to explain a lot what it is. But it is so much fun!

It's not super niche, but I've never met anyone outside of the hobby that even knows it exists.

Anyway, I enjoy car audio competitions a lot. One version is SPL (sound pressure level) where the goal is to build a system that can get as loud as possible. Then there's SQ (sound quality) that's more about making the best sounding system you can, which is also fairly artsy (make it look pretty).

There's a lot of people who are assholes about it, they're the kid down the street blaring his music at 10 o clock at night. Every who does it for a hobby are very respectful of other people and recognize that the vast majority of people don't wanna hear your music.

I enjoy it for a few reasons. Firstly, I just love music. Music is a while body experience. It's not just your ears, but your skin reacts to the vibrations as well, and you just aren't gonna get that experience with cheap speakers. The car is a great place to feel music because it's enclosed and you can generally go somewhere to not bother people.

The other part, is that its very hands on and problem solving. You're doing woodworking, electrical design, maybe fiberglass. Lots of different engineering.

[email protected] is one of my hobbies. I mod this community too! Join our hot lap challenge! :D

growing chillies in beer cans

Left is a ghost pepper, right is a 7 Pot Congo

I was about to share some of mine but then comparing to everyone in the comments I realize mine are basic as hell

This could be niche, but I'm a fountain pen nerd. I love stationary, different types of papers inks and nibs and how they all influence the writing experience.

I collect plushies/stuffed animals (to the point where I'm running out of room for more) and I've played Tabletop RPG games like Pathfinder, Shadowrun and GURPS for a good few years.