It seems like there's some overlap with the Bartle types from online gaming. You tend to have 4 main motivations to play an massively-multiplayer online game:

It seems like there's some overlap with the Bartle types from online gaming. You tend to have 4 main motivations to play an massively-multiplayer online game: there's the explorers, the achievers, the socializers, and the killers. Most hobbies don't literally have a "killer" group (I hope), but maybe the real-world analogous thing is people who enjoy telling other people they suck at their hobby. The other groups seem to apply. You have the people who want to know everything about the hobby, the people who want to be the best at that hobby, and the people who like interacting with that hobby's community. (And just like in online games, too many "killers" can ruin the fun that the socializers are there for. We all know communities that fell apart because they were overrun by snobs and trolls.) This is something that's been debated over the years, but I think Bartle missed a fifth type, which is people who want to create. In online gaming, these could be the people who actually programmed the game in the first place, or it could be players who are very into user generated content (especially in games like Minecraft where that's a big part of the game). Similarly there are people who are into gear to the point where they're building their own gear, or even designing original equipment. I'm that way with music. I'm not very good at guitar or piano or any other instrument and I don't know how to compose, but I got into microtonalism and just intonation, and since proper instruments for that don't really exist (save for continuous-pitch instruments like violin), I've been adapting guitars for a variety of different tunings and building electronic instruments. When you think about it it's pretty weird that I'm learning Kicad and PCB layout because the major third on a 12-EDO instrument is out of tune by about fifteen cents (because the 12th root of 2 to the 4th power is a very crude approximation of 5/4), but sometimes that's just how it goes.