Very few people speak at conferences as a hobby. Even fewer speak at conferences as hobby about things they get paid for. Even fewer would be legitimately willing to do this if it included an expensive middle-of-the-night flight, jet lag, and a Visa application process.

I've done it. Of course, I didn't travel internationally just for the conference and I didn't need a visa, but I've attended tech conferences on my own--including speaking. Why not? And how many Europeans who attend FOSDEM or Americans who attend Flock (admittedly a lower bar than traveling internationally) are doing so on their own?

Generally, when you apply for a visa, there's documentation guiding you towards the correct type of visa based on purpose of visit. Everything I've seen buckets conferences under "business visa".

That changes the parameters of the hypothetical. Your original hypothetical was explicitly about misrepresenting the purpose of one's visit to a country, which one should not do because that's illegal. *OBVIOUSLY*.

Whether attending a conference for a hobby counts as a vacation trip or a business trip would be a question for the destination country's consular affairs office.

> If you go to a conference for a hobby that's tourism, right?

That's exactly what I was told (as a statement, not as a question) by an official a few years ago when applying for a visa for a trip to Germany.

I know governments aren't always commonsensical but it would seem odd if someone (not in the business) would need a business visa to attend Comic-Con or similar.