“You can't be what you can't see”: Community-Based Support and Representation in Diverse Cycling Communities on Instagram

Sports and leisure cycling offer numerous health and social benefits, yet participation remains predominantly limited to a normative male stereotype. This paper explores how underrepresented communities use Instagram to promote broadened participation. Through interviews with 12 cyclists involved in these communities, we investigate how these digital spaces address barriers to participation and provide social support. Our findings reveal how Instagram facilitates the creation of flexible, diverse ‘patchwork communities’ that challenge traditional narratives and provide representation for cyclists with broad, underrepresented, intersectional identities. We highlight the critical role of representation as a form of social support and discuss key tensions between platform affordances, user practices, and community dynamics, including challenges in balancing visibility and safety, and user versus platform-curated content. This research contributes to sociotechnical understandings of online community building in sports, providing implications for fostering more inclusive and sustainable digital spaces for diverse users in an ever-changing online landscape.