Texting to whom, though, no? Especially online communication suffers from the people you want to communicate to not being on the platform. And since people organize in loose clusters you need to convince a majority of your cluster to adopt the platform. This is especially difficult when there are more popular alternatives that are not interoperable with others.
Mesh networks are potentially better because they are more resilient and don’t lock you into inoperability with other systems. But before this resilience is tested, how do you demonstrate the upside? Especially mesh networks require nodes in proximity.
Functions could be extended and you could provide services over the mesh using automatic messaging (all with reasonable respect for the available bandwidth). But more complex services require reliability. Isn’t this why it lacks adoption?
Right, that wouldbe the “testing resilience” case I mentioned. Setting up a node ain’t trivial though (I’m procrastinating to do just that right now), so I wonder about the required preparedness.
I expect the utility and reliability to grow with the number of users though.