Support groups for sure, but I was more thinking of things like sporting clubs, dog parks, skate parks, artistic communities, soup kitchens, men's sheds, book clubs. Third spaces.
Anything where participation is voluntary, hierarchy is absent or minimal, and people come together to share interests, resources, time, or company.
Community.
They're all groups of people with some kind of shared purpose or values. Cults are harmful and power based. Communities are helpful and consent-based. Religions can fall either way, or somewhere in the middle.
Protein is protein right? I'm sure any half decent chef could figure out how to make insects tasty with a little trial and error.
Well the problem is that "bug" is not a scientific term right? Or even if it is, colloquially I think it could easily refer to either insects specifically or arthropods more generally.
Certainly a lot of people refer to spiders as bugs despite them not being insects.
There is probably little practical help you can give, but don't underestimate the importance and impact of social and emotional support.
When someone is in such a shitty situation, just knowing that there are people who care makes a huge difference. So just be a good friend. Listen and empathise when they need to talk about shit. Give them a laugh when they need cheering up or distraction from the bullshit.
I'll never forget dialling into a work meeting with the corporate infosec team who we needed some guidance from.
Their rep shows up and it's a fem-presenting person with pink cat-ear headphones.
I'm like oh fuck they sent the big guns, this is exactly who we needed to talk to. And I was right, we got exactly what we needed.
There's more to it than that. Firstly, at a theoretical level you dealing with the concepts of entropy and information density. A given file has a certain level of information in it. Compressing it is sort of like distilling the file down to its purest form. Once you reached that point, there's nothing left to "boil away" without losing information.
Secondly, from a more practical point of view, compression algorithms are designed to work nicely with "normal" real world data. For example as a programmer you might notice that your data often contains repeated digits. So say you have this data: "11188885555555". That's easy to compress by describing the runs. There are three 1s, four 8s, and seven 5s. So we can compress it to this: "314875". This is called "Run Length Encoding" and it just compressed our data by more than half!
But look what happens if we try to apply the same compression to our already compressed data. There are no repeated digits, there's just one 3, then one 1, and so on: "131114181715". It doubled the size of our data, almost back to the original size.
This is a contrived example but it illustrates the point. If you apply an algorithm to data that it wasn't designed for, it will perform badly.
And last just as long.
The engineering department at my uni had a tensile strength testing machine which says "Made in the GDR" on it, a country that hasn't existed for 40+ years.
Definitely, I don't really like Ubuntu that much even though it's my go-to. What I like is Xfce. Whether I get it via xubuntu or something else I don't really care.
Rules and leaders don't have to be harmful or coercive though. Even very egalitarian communities need norms. Hell even an anarchosyndicalist commune will have some shared set of expectations of its members.
Like you said, cults are about control. I have a hard time seeing much of a parallel between the necessary structure and norms of a community or club, and the coercive nature of a cult.