Ask Lemmy

If you have the resources to spare, grab a pad of paper and a basic #2 pencil, or a box of crayons, colored pencils, chalk, charcoal, whatever, and pick up drawing with it?

Also, there's plenty of easy, and actually kinda fun, crafts you could mess around with.

Although, given this is traditional art or crafts I'm suggesting, you'll also need some way to digitize it if you want to show it off online.

Origami, you can start very cheap and simple and with time get into as complex as you want and still not expensive.

Game development. Just to make a simple 2D game you have tools that require varying amounts of money, from nothing to a few hundred bucks. Look into Game Maker and Godot, or RPG Maker if you want to make an RPG. If you don’t want to code, Game Maker or RPG Maker are probably your best bet.

Have you tried crochet or knitting? It can be both simple and complicated, big and small projects.

Knitting is more suitable for clothes, stretchy things.

Crochet is more suitable for stiff things like amiguries, bags etc.

You can 100% make clothes with crochet and bags with knitting. It's maybe not as common only

Do you want to do your hobby on a laptop? Learn Blender, it's free. You can also pirate other software such as zbrush and go nuts have fun with that.

Do you want to have your hobby at home but not on a laptop? Well, gardening, sketching, learn to play an instrument, cooking.

Do you want your hobby to get you out of the house? I recommend tabletop gaming. Birdwatching. Photography

I go through phases of collecting/trialing hobbies as a hobby. I develop a list of things I'm interested in, what about them is drawing my interest, how much it would cost to jump into entry-level projects, and a target I want to hit to understand if it's a hobby I want to keep one not. Also how I'll learn.

So for me that looks something like:

1. leatherworking, I really want a customized notebook holder that fits exactly what I'm looking for. That's $20 in basic tools, $50 in leather including enough for simpler projects as I develop skills. Target is to try something simple, like a baggage tag or simple bifold wallet to see if I like it before spending more time and money on it. Plenty of YouTube videos available, local Tandy store has classes, my sister also knows the basics.

2. digitizing the parents' photo negatives. I want a brain dead project to do while watching movies during cold winter evenings when I'm not going outside. Cost is negligible, I have the stuff I need. Time needed to develop a good workflow and file naming and tagging system. Maybe some YouTube videos if needed, brother is a photographer and willing to consult on workflow. Longer term: buy external hard drives and gift to siblings or talk to brother about his Immich server. Branch off into new project to self-host Immich myself?

I have six more items on the "do I want to turn these into hobbies" list. It's a hobby in itself to learn about and plan potential hobbies.

If you think making music in your web browser sounds cool and arent completely averse to text based programming, you should try out https://strudel.cc/

Example of a cool person on youtube doing this live

Functional example from the softwares introduction guide

Writing is cheap and easy to start, but with so much skill to build

3D printing, mainly because you can use it to amplify just about any other hobby, and maybe save some money printing things you would have bought. Sure, you can print goofy little doodads and shit, but there are infinite practical uses as well. Get good with 3D modeling, and now you can transform ideas into physical concepts. And let me tell you, there is no feeling or sense of satisfaction quite like holding something functional you designed and made yourself for $2.50 in materials and a few hours of your time. Especially if you saved yourself a few hundred bucks not buying something new.

My laptop oriented hobbies in no particular order: Coding, music making, writing, 3d modeling, gaming

Volunteer for things you find interesting or fun.

Check out OpenStreetMap:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/
And help map out your area.

You can help out with a variety of different research projects over on the Zooniverse:
https://www.zooniverse.org/

Help out with research on wildlife in your area:
https://www.inaturalist.org/

Contribute to Wikipedia:
https://www.wikipedia.org/

If you feel passionate about consumer rights, you can contribute to the wiki here:
https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Main_Page

If you like to tinker with electronics, check out Fulu Bounties and get paid for helping to get around DRM on refrigerators or on an Xbox.
https://bounties.fulu.org/

Then of course there's always volunteering for organizations nearby.

Why? I have reasons for each of these projects but for me it just sparks joy in contributing to projects that will help others.

I enjoy disc golf. Many courses are in public parks and discs are cheap.

What's your budget? You can get a ukulele or guitar for fairly cheap, and there are websites full of chords or tabs for songs. You can play hundreds of songs if you just know a few chords.

There are tutorial videos on YouTube to get you started. Play and sing along. You'll suck at first, but if you keep at it and play every day you'll get to be pretty good.

I like to program as a hobby (though I also do it as a professional, so I get a lot of paid time to learn this stuff too) and so much stuff is just freely available online. Tutorials, documentation, tools, whatever, mostly open-source which means free to use and play with as you please.

You can make web pages with nothing but a text editor and any one of a million guides on web programming. Just put HTML code in a text file and open it in your browser, and bam you’ve got a web page. You can gradually learn stuff like CSS and JavaScript to make them look neat and do cool stuff. Then you can use GitHub Pages to deploy your pages to the internet for other people to see and use. Or learn a programming language like Python to build a web server that serves up that HTML you learned. You don’t need a beefy machine at all to write code.

Mobile app development

I got onto design there for a while. Sketchup Make is still free out there if you can find it. Blender is also an option.

Learning is another option. Khan Academy, MIT Open Courseware.

Brewing, taking care of plants, terrariums, puzzles, bonsai, yoga. All good stuff.

It's unclear if you want to have a hobby on a laptop or whether that doesn't matter.

If it doesn't - mending is great. Some people have already recommended knitting and crotcheting, and while mending clothes is usually a mix of these two and sewing, I find it easier and faster paced than making something anew. Also regarding the sustainability aspect - buying new yarn and making something that you possibly might not need or enjoy vs repairing something you own and might otherwise throw out (and if you end up messing up you have hardly any losses. It was a try to save something from the landfill). It's in a way a gateway to knitting, sewing, crotcheting, embroidery, but it is great on its own.

But it doesn't have to be just clothes. Trying to figure out how you can make broken stuff last longer or adapt it as necessary is also great.

The only downside is that if you work a lot on your computer or something desktop-ish, then you might want to choose something outside to give your eyes a rest from focussing on something that is rather close.

roguelike development

Go outside