Hear, hear! My friend group in high school had its own Proboards forum and we spent so much of our free time on there. (And we weren't the only ones, either.) I'd say the split was 60-40 male/female. We talked about everything—political topics, gaming, arts and crafts, literature—and I owe much of my development as a kid to those conversations. It makes me sad that those kinds of half-online, half-offline communities don't seem to be around much anymore. It felt like we owned our own little plot of online land, tended to it, inhabited it. It was nothing like renting some page space on Facebook or standing on a Twitter soapbox.
After reading the delightful chapter on Community Memory in "Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution", I've been thinking of ways to get back to this local, more intimate style of online conversation. It seems that with the centralized nature of the web, an abundance of resources leads to the formation of a limited few communication hubs to which everyone gravitates. How easy would it be to create some sort of mesh network hub or beacon that would only let people in a local area connect to each other and create their own decentralized forums or databases? Thinking back on my high school forum experiences, the success of things like Nextdoor, local community events such as UC Bekeley's Anoncon, and even things like Geocaching, I think this could be an incredible paradigm shift for those who are tired of the overwhelming numbers and impersonality of today's "social" web.
It's only the spark of an idea, but few things excite me more than the social possibilities of a publicly-accessible network firmly and intrinsically rooted in a particular physical area!