Yeah back on the days of analogue telephone lines every phone number ultimately required 2 copper wires going all the way from the nearest local exchange to the telephone handset in the home or business, so many smaller towns and rural areas got party lines as a way to save on copper and switching costs. Instead of a dedicated pair of copper wires to every house with a phone, all of the houses on a given block were on one line (all on one electrical circuit), so you’d pick up the phone and be able to talk to (or listen to) your other neighbors without dialing.
Edit to add: in some rural areas they’d even use the barbed wire fences already at farms as a wire for delivering telephone service instead of running new phone lines, sometimes even using Single Wire Earth Return to further reduce copper requirements
I think the difference is historically hobbies involved making things (woodworking, model building, sewing, playing music, drawing, writing, scrapbooking, etc.) or were purely physical (hiking, playing sports, shooting things, etc.) partly out of necessity due to home media being practically nonexistent outside of books and magazines which require literacy (a high bar up to about the 20th century)
Within about one generation we went from books and magazines being the only mass market home media to suddenly having access to more home media than we could ever consume. My grandmother has told me about her family getting their first TV and how she imagined it would be like a radio with a little screen you could walk up to and see a static image depicting what’s being described when you wanted to but would otherwise listen to like radio
People are now by default consumers, where even just 50 years ago it was still the default for people to make stuff, fix stuff, etc. at home. Boredom drove skill building, now boredom just drives consumption. To make matters worse, mass digitization ultimately came in the form of smartphones with apps powered by addictive algorithms, so people (myself included) are addicted to the cheap dopamine that these screens of colorful lights provide us. This is the crux of the matter, and there’s a growing trend (partly driven by enshitification) of de-digitizing as people realize how bad these screens are for our mental health