Why don't we build a little coastal town with a community theme in mind?
1. We pick an area on the map, somewhere a good distance from spawn, to build the town. Someplace hilly and grassy with lots of ocean and a long coastline to build on, maybe even facing east so we all have beautiful sunrises over the water.
2. We try to keep a theme to the town of cabin & ranch style houses. Nothing over two stories, no towers or huge square buildings, no castles.
3. We can have community buildings, like public farms for wheat, reeds, trees, cactus, etc. instead of each of our houses being fully self sustaining.
4. We can make a huge public branch mine. I could get this started. Basically we build a staircase down to bedrock and then make a long tall tunnel from bedrock to Y=16 or so that extends in one direction (away from spawn), then we mine 1x2 tunnels spaced every 4 blocks, with staggered tunnels on top of each other. It's how I do all of my mines, it's very efficient, you expose all blocks along the way with minimal actual mining. I could get the mine started, once it's started it would be pretty clear how to keep expanding it. Then people could just grab a branch and mine it, and we could just keep extending the main shaft for as long as we need it to be to create new branches.
In short, build a cozy little community where we all "live" and work together instead of being spread out and doing each of our own things. I mean, it's not like we are deleting or erasing what we already have, but this could be a community project that we all can build together.
Any thoughts?