Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular to

Usenet somewhat has that division of space, in that it's divided up into thousands of individual newsgroups, each of which is (ostensibly) about a particular topic. It's more like having thousands of parallel NYCs, each one focusing on just a specific subset of the overall culture. To your point, they're still public spaces though where anyone can come in and yell about their thing, that is undeniable (and it happened).