the fediverse.

Thermodynamics, specifically refrigeration cycles.

Its probably my autism showing but the fact that we can just move funny fluid around and make heat move is absolutely fascinating. I can spend a lot of time making theoretical refrigeration cycles with different fluids, thermoelectrics, heat capacities, repurposing car junkyard AC systems, etc.

Millions of people do it for work, sure. I doubt any of them are "into it".

Earlier this year I tried out a Steam demo of a game called "That Time I Found a Box" and got hooked on it. It's a very unique card game where you create and enhance the cards as you play. I played it for days and eventually beat the demo - the devs told me I was the first person to beat it.

The full version just came out on Steam - I'd recommend taking a look. It's a bit janky and not for everybody, but it does something unique that really clicked for me.

I’m the only person I know IRL who uses lemmy (lol) and openstreetmap :)

I try to curate zines from around the world into local exhibitions, do hand translating alongside if need be, imitate the original paper best I can.

It's kinda fun lol. That and kinda similarly, but I love♡ spending time on online software radio sites, just listening into different channels like I was there myself.

I'm not into gaming. I think I'm the only adult male I know of comparable age that isn't. I don't really know why. I think it's a mental block. I was big into 16-bit Atari/Amiga games in the early 90s. Then I just hit like 16/17 and got into music and drinking to fit in. The gaming scene at the time (pre-internet) was social kryptonite, and I lived in rural Scotland so I left it all behind.

Oddly, I returned to general computing in my early 20s as the internet was blowing up and now work in the IT sector.

But still not a gamer, which ironically is quite isolating.

I really like killing invasive plants. I think that's probably my most niche passion. Like when I have some free time I'll just go into the woods behind my house and cut down wisteria, ivy, Chinese holly.... I just find it extremely satisfying idk. I love the idea that I'm clearing out space for native plants (and in turn native animals) to grow.

I have a lot of obscure interests, but not as obscure as yours.

• Finding former Pizza Huts in North America. It's just such an iconic building design. There's a documentary out now on them, but I've been fascinated for almost a decade now.

• Meshtastic

• John le Carré novels. He was huge decades ago, but basically nobody knows the name now besides Boomers and genre fans.

One year on Spotify I was in the top I think 1% of lou reed listeners.

There’s a lot of Robotech/Macross stuff out there, but I rarely see anyone post online about it, and I’ve never met anyone in person who even knows what it is.

I'm sure there's probably someone out there, but I'm really interested in cool border crossings and how they represent nations on each side. As much as I am no nationalist, I find those projections of strength, friendship, security, etc. all super interesting.

Oh, and fake/fantasy transit maps. Those are always fun to draw up in my spare time.

I play single player video games and I roleplay and tell stories about my characters. I’ve done it with BG3, Elden Ring, Skyrim, Oblivion, Fire Emblem, and Pokemon. I take notes and write little stories for myself. I cultivate a little headcanon universe for each game, and I even let my roleplay alter my gameplay in meaningful ways. I don’t know if anyone else plays these games like this but I haven’t found much community for it.

Whenever I'm going abroad within Europe, for a bit over month before that, I start buying stuff only with banknotes. I put all of the coins made in Finland or (other) Baltic countries in a separate pocket and then make sure to use those during my travel.

It feels nice that people get to see coins that they don't see that often. And at the same time, I'm increasing the relative amount of non-Finnish coins in Finland, which I also think is good, as that helps people here notice that there's more to the EU than just Finland :)

I would guess it's unlikely that all that many other people do the same.

Bash scripting, firewall config, vpn tunnelling, and containerization ( rootless Podman ).

I’m into combining these in interesting ways.

While it could be argued that there are tons of communities for these, combining them to run secure apps or automate their setups don’t seem to be as popular.

It’s a hot topic at social events, as you can imagine.

I’m an avid reader, and I like reading in original language. That has brought me in a variety of rabbit holes, including trying to learn Russian, then Japanese. Unfortunately, I forgot most of it. I also forgot most of my ancient Greek, but my Latin is still vaguely useful. My German and Spanish never reached the “I can read anything” level, that is a shame because I really want to read the Don Quixote and Goethe... But I’m proud to easily read in 3 languages, struggling in 2-3 others (depending how much dictionary use is allowed).

I haven’t been able to find a community of people that like this. Most like a specific culture and go deep into a single language.

I like to contribute to various open-source implimentations of classic games from the 90s

FoundryVTT, baby! Somewhere north of 70,000 downloads for a very feature rich virtual tabletop that you'd think more D&D / Computer Nerds would be into.

If you want to get even more bespoke, I'm the proud owner of a version 2 box of "Kingdom Death", a $400 boardgame designed in the spirit of Monster Hunter or Dark Souls. You play a primitive band of survivalists, hunting horrifying monsters for their body parts, in order to slowly claw your civilization's way out of a Lovecraftian dark age.

I tried to find an in-person calligraphy meetup around my area and mind you, I live in one of the bigger metro areas in the country. Couldn't find squat. Don't know if my Google Fu was weak or I just don't know what to actually look up but there's nothing specifically for calligraphy as far as I can tell. Also, I don't count online spaces.

Well.. I'm using an instance that has 10 active users according to https://piefed.fediverse.observer/list :)

I wanted to move from Lemmy to PieFed, because its development is faster than that of Lemmy's and because its maintainers have values I have nothing against and because I want to help a cool project grow.

And then I had a bunch of criteria that I wanted my instance to fulfill, and piefed.ee was the only PieFed instance that fulfilled all of my wishes. So, now I'm apparently one out of ten :)

When watching incest porn, I try to figure out how everybody can be in a step-relationship with everybody else there. How is it possible for step-mom, step-dad, step-bro and step-sis to all live in the same house with no one else?

One of the very first mud games, mud2 by Richard Bartle.

http://www.mudii.co.uk/

I'm really, really into what I can only call technological bootstrapping. Like, we started out on this planet with nothing, and then built everything. How did that happen? Primitive tech is another name but the emphasis is usually on the very first stages.

That itself has gotten me into obscure things like metrology, greenwood working and small-scale semiconductor fabrication.