> It seems like an edge case either already served by existing tech except for some very, very small set of situations where most won’t consider it practical or useful anyway
Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future.
SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted.
Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.
I think to answer your underlying question of ‘why’ a bit.
You say ‘robust’ for societies as if it’s a given positive, but there is an implied statement hidden there.
Robust against what?
Robust against censorship is rarely desired by the majority (and certainly not openly), because the censorship is with the consent (and often at the request of!) the majority.
Just look at the CSAM/Kiddie Porn discussion in the US.
At least as long as the majorities interests and the gov’ts interests align enough, which is usually for far longer than anyone wants to admit.
So as long as it doesn’t step on the majorities ability to get what they want when they want it more than they are willing to tolerate, robustness against it will always be a feature with a limited market and a lot of opposition. An anti-feature in some ways, or at least it will be spun that way.
We may consider robustness against this good - and I personally do - but in my experience that is far from a common attribute, especially if you boil it down to specific examples.
Should Pakistan be able to robustly send how to bomb US targets + propaganda to everyone? Should someone be able to do the same with child porn? Or anti-Islamic rhetoric? Or anti-women’s rights? Or anti-free speech?
I think I explained "robust" in the post above pretty well. It's about making a network that works and delivers information even when things go wrong or when there's not much infrastructure available.
Primarily for the use case where there's just not much reliable infrastructure. I like the idea of getting a local snapshot of news, important source repository updates, and other things important to me during little snippets of connectivity.
But this also makes things useful for the case where the infrastructure is impaired. Perhaps by natural disaster. Perhaps by state interference. Perhaps by individual commercial actors.
Yes, "how does one determine what the network distributes broadly" is a complicated question. It should be democratic and resilient to being coopted. I understand this is very, very hard. But I don't think it's intractable, and even without it the other building blocks of a network like this are attainable (general resilience and reliability).
Yes, it's all about the edge cases that don't affect the commercial value of the network much. It's about dealing with natural disaster, intermittent and very low quality network connections by modern standards, people in remote areas, or censorship. It may even be about space missions and distant probes in the future.
SSB is a neat system if you're on a sailboat with connectivity every few days. Othernet is a neat system for pushing what satellite communications can do to the limit. Of course, systems being technically neat is not what gets them adopted.
Networks, network capacity, and network reach have grown so much that we've forgotten about UUCP, etc. We have better algorithmic tools and more computation to build networks that tolerate disconnection, intermittency, etc. But perhaps we don't have the commercial motivation to use them, even if they would make the networks and societies that use them more robust.