What Use Is An F-call?

What use is an F-call? Recently I got to thinking about this hobby of Amateur Radio. It's not like any other hobbies I've had in the past. It's different in so many ways that it took me a little by surprise. When I played with lego, electric trains or on my home computer in my teens, I was a hobbyist. I spent time, effort and money on my hobbies. When I came across another enthusiast, I exchanged ideas and findings and carried on with what I'd learned. Sometimes we combined efforts and I recall making a huge railway yard in the attic with about six friends, each of our tracks hand-marked to prevent inadvertent ownership transfer. With the age of the Internet, you'd expect that you'd see an evolution beyond that. You'd see people getting together in communities and sharing their hobby. While this does happen, much more than when I was a teenager, there are hundreds of places for each hobby, most of them insular and self-contained, region specific, language specific, what ever. Amateur Radio is different.