@khurtwilliams Forgive my verbosity but you struck a chord here. I had deleted my original micro blog account a while back and missed it dearly and ended coming back recently. My reason for leaving was different than yours but I'm really glad to be back. I kind of wish I would have just taken a break instead of deleting my account though.

Exploring people via Discover has been useful to me. Nobody's just a sofware developer or just anything. Though micro blog may "discourage search" as you say, I've found it does encourage exploration and discovery of new people and ideas (and blogs). There's a number of people who talk about a diverse range of topics if you explore. That's exactly how I found you and I've linked to Island in the Net from my 19-year-old daily pointers project 5 times since December. As a web "curator (of sorts)," I can't even express just how helpful this community has been to me (which pertains to more than just discovery).

I find it useful to explore a user's profile (such as micro.blog/khurtwill...) to see what things they talk about. Whether I find users to explore from Discover or from other people I follow (in their replies, etc.), the time put into exploration is worth it.

However, I understand your dissapointment first hand and if you want to quickly find people who share your interests, you might want to try searching Google for:

"formula 1" site:micro.blog

3 other things which might be helpful: 1) Post more and about things that interest you. 2) Engage with people who talk about (or share) things you're interested (a lot of photography in Discover, for example). Engagement makes it a community. 3) Follow more people (developers or not) and you'll be surprised at the diversity of ideas here.

Sharing is a funny animal. Its value is not found in how many responses one gets to something they share. If it was, I would have left the web long ago.