Ask Lemmy

Knitting. It's part witchcraft, part voodoo.

Cycling. They go from 'this is fun', to full blown road dictators, in about 2 weeks.

Edit: just watch. The downvotes will likely display their cult rage.

Community theater can get pretty weird. (It can just as easily be not weird and awesome, though)

Society for Creative Anachronism

Gunpla, pop/labubu, liquid-cooing/overclocking, 3D printing, drones/RC

There is a bit of a threshold between an innocent hobby and a cult, but once crossed, it's.... yeah...

I second DnD and Warhammer, and i'll add Magic the Gathering to this list

Any sort of hypebeast scam. Labubu, pop up clothing companies with no real design or quality, beanie babies, most crypto, specific vinyl collections. It's only worth something if you know some deep dark lore about it which requires effort to research and understand, then you're hooked. It's post capitalism cult energy.

I feel like it would be easier to list the hobbies that aren't, based on the answers so far.

Religion. 🤌🏼

Nix and NixOS

Buying used panties from onlyfans sites.

I think you need to specify what you mean by cult. The way I personally understand it, a cult includes a leader who exploits their members for free labor, oftentimes for sexual gratification, and removes them from their friends and families while subjecting them to psychological manipulation. I'm having a hard time thinking of a hobby that meets the criteria I'm more familiar with.

Honestly, I don't think very many of them could really be described as such, as at the very least most hobbies either don't have a person or group that could be called it's leader, or if they do, it's generally some business that owns some relevant IP that very much isn't considered unquestionable and above criticism. You could get cults that emerge within some hobby group instead of taking up the whole subculture, but given even things as mundane as exercise groups have had this happen before, I'd guess that can technically happen in just about any of them.

Definitely warhammer. Can't stand those punks. Have you noticed a lot of warhammer lore reaction videos

Auditing pre-clears.

vtubers

Celsius energy drinks.

I had a coworker evangelize about them so I decided to try them out. Every time I got one and tried it some complete random would come up 'Hey! You like Celsius? Have you tried the [whatever] flavors? [Other flavor] is my favorite!'

I found them all gross.

Improv