It would be tough to get any adoption at larger than a small handful of people scale, and most of that already happens over private chat platforms.
I help curate networks for my fraternity (US, college for those of you not familiar with it). Many of us are in the same or related career fields, and there’s a few hobbies that are common to find in the group (sports, music, etc). These are people who, for the most part, genuinely enjoy spending time with each other, meeting up a few times a year as at larger events like our colleges homecoming and our founders day. Many spouses are close friends too and people who live near each other often hang out together, kids play sports on same teams, etc.
But even with those things going for us, it is damn hard to curate any sort of social space with continued interaction. People have become accustomed to things being so niche, that groups with wide-ranging topics are dead. If people want to talk guitars, they’ll do that on a subreddit, or find the Facebook group for their cars. People self-select into hyper-specified conversation groups. I have been unsuccessful in finding a way to successfully foster wider, continuous conversation in a group setting.
The closest I’ve seen to that is in larger family text threads where aunts/cousins/etc will occasionally share pics of what they’re doing or share that they got a promotion at work or something. It seems rare outside of a family dynamic.
I hope the OP, or someone figures out a good way to build community that isn’t just laser focused on a specific thing, or built around a cult of personality, but I fear that’s more or less human nature, at least in current US culture.