What makes people use centralized services is their utility. People will pick up new tools and repurpose them if they find them useful. In theory the web is sup

What makes people use centralized services is their utility. People will pick up new tools and repurpose them if they find them useful. In theory the web is supposed to be about communication and connection. I think the emphasis on building a local network is a good idea. P2P mesh is cool but until it provides opportunities that don't exist otherwise it is unlikely to surpass. The notion of building this for places without internet access is a positive angle but also tricky. Charity is seldom as successful or scalable as user driven initiatives. A lot of mobile phones now exist in places w/o "internet" per se. But from my understanding say converting a 3 year old smartphone into a mesh 1st device seems challenging from a wifi driver and power consumption and app perspective. Balancing the project of design that is easy for non-technical people with the notion of eating your own dogfood one can theorize about building alternatives to the hierarchical Internet. This is the challenge though, figuring out how to build utility that is superior to the walled gardens and is in the hands of the users to control.