Gardeners.
So many gates to maintain.

I grew up in a very conservative Catholic community. Imagine a group where JD Vance and Harrison Butker would be considered mild. If a new person didn't show up in the right kind of clothes and faux humility, people would make a snap judgement and start gossiping. If the new person were wealthy or had a lot of children (8+) or were in a medical field, they would probably be ok. The single parent mom with two kids who dared to send one to public school for better STEM classes? Lol, she had no chance.

There was a "welcome wagon" type group who were supposed to invite new people to coffee and doughnuts with the congregation in the basement after services. I watched the one invite one family and offer a handshake, visibly retracted the hand to skip over Single Mom, and then extend an invitation to the next family. Ice cold.

A lot of more traditional hobby communities like HAM and model aircraft clubs, that want you to take a dozen tests to play with them. Those same communities seem to scratch their heads as to why they can't attract new members.

Railway and train modellers, of all scales. To their credit, a fair fee people are becoming more open, but especially modelling clubs are often run by old white men with questionable politics and problematic behaviours. They will sneer at anything that's not steam, or at people who run modern instead of vintage trains, or who don't get a train model exactly right the way the original ran that one time in the mid 50s from Bumfuck, Idaho to the middle of nowhere. They have little patience for newbies who might not have internalised all the lingo, or who might need something explained in simple English. If you build something that is not an exact replica of a real world location, they'll say you're not doing model railway, but merely toy trains. And then these same people go and wonder why they can't attract new people to the hobby.

Vegan groups. You will toe the party line comrade! And yes, shellfish are intelligent animals with a rich social and emotional life.

"But they don't have the nerve types and brain structures to feel pain as we do..."

"HERETIC!"

The guys running /Politics and /WorldNews will ban people if they don't endorse israel committing Genocide.

Gamers love to call people who focus on one particular type of game or console "not real gamers"

North Korea

Fire Emblem Three Houses, the game literally has an NPC named "Gatekeeper" who won a yearly Fire Emblem popularity poll with the highest vote count ever.

Farmers. I'm local and from an established farming family, but because I didn't end up in a branch that's still active I might as well be dog shit, and not just on farming-related matters.

Well, maybe dog shit is a slight exaggeration, but damn they will give you the cold shoulder.

Gatekeeping enthusiasts

North Korea.

lemmy.ml

Security guards.

Sheepdog trials. Though mostly it's about making things go through the gates.

Do you even care about movies if you don’t watch them in the original language?

To be honest I’m that guy. But I don’t judge anymore and German dubs are actually top notch compared to other countries. But it’s a tough decision for me to watch a new movie in German just so I can share it with someone else and I will comment on it once!

TERFs

hoarders are good at gate keeping

Any "hardcore full loot pvp MMORPG"

Archlinux

Reddit.

Bouncers

On the flip side, the ukulele community is so open and friendly, helped me stick with a hobby I sucked at to begin with, and now I've released actual music!

By time required before you can truly be in and accepted as one (not just a tourist)

• Rural folk
• Expedition sports
• Biker gangs
• Private pilots
• Some festivals