Co-founder of Hax0rbana here. I now live in a metro area of about 120K. Prior to that, I lived in the DC area and LA before that. I mention this for 2 reasons:
1. I don't know if you consider my situstion to be rural. The town is surrounded by cornfields, but I'll leave that to you to decide.
2. It's clear some people answering are clearly city folks. That's fine, but they only know the stereotypes about rural folks being uneducated, straight, poor, etc.
Urbana, IL has a University of Illinois campus. In other words, it's a college town. To give you an idea of the culture, churches have pride flags painted on their signs and hang black lives matter banners. The main event at annual engineering open house is robo brawl, a scaled down version of battle bots. We have art scattered around town, made by local artists. The Independent Media Center has things ranging from a Makerspace, to a bicycle repair community, to books to prisoners. If you show up wanting to learn something, people will be happy to share what they know.
For amemities, we have gigabit fiber run by a regional company. If you want Comcast, they're here to. We have one of the best public transit systems in the country.
This doesn't describe all rural areas/smaller towns.
When we were selecting a city to start our hacker co-housing project, we factored in many things: cost of living, having smart people around, weather, taxes, civil rights, and of course the town's culture (with bigotry being the primary concern).
I think the main takeaway is to choose the location carefully. Not all rural areas are alike, just like not all big cities are alike. Think about the things that matter to you, and measure potential destinations based on those criteria. If it's critical that you have a goth club or something like that, you'll probably end up in a bigger city.