It's pretty hard to imagine anyone "getting serious" with these tiny radios designed for reading gas meters and weather stations and using that to build some kind of off-grid alternate Internet.

I'd almost have more faith on dragging out all the old acoustic coupler modems and building a city-wide string-and-tin-can telephone network.

Of course they are not useless. My hiking/camping friends put together a fun orienteering game which used Meshtastic to do live GPS tracking. Worked great for that. But a country spanning meshternet it is not.

I don't think it needs to be though. There are plenty of things to explore using these things at the local 1-10 km scale.

To be fair it is already a miracle that there is enough Metastatic in my area that I can (sometimes/rarely) send a message between my home and work!

*disclaimer that I am coming off a recent disillusionment with Meshtastic. I thought it would be fun to make a single raspberry pi image with all the dev tools on it to do some off-grid dev/maintenance work if you were to treat this seriously and pretend the main internet is down. That moment came when I tried to compile something and the Pi ran out of memory. Really? I need more than 1GB RAM to compile something used to send short text messages?! That's nuts!