Reddit works sort of all right for small and medium sized cities, but for most of small town rural America, people just use Facebook, not reddit, so it would likely be extremely hard to move people en masse out of Facebook for community organization. The network effects are simply far too massive to overcome no matter how good the other social network could be made.

Chicken and egg problem for people who work with chickens and eggs.

I'm sure it would be a lot of fun, but a couple things would need to happen. (1) They're just not going to do it

(2) There needs to be a lot more attention being paid to this

It should be a community board. It's free. It's available to the public. And its a place everyone can get to. You could make it a free-to-enter-only place where people can submit content, but that kind of limits the content to reddit. It really should be a free-to-use board, like a forum.