MeshNets
After the Global Information Apocalypse rendered the old internet unusable for anything other than bank transactions and e-commerce, crafty data hoarders, ham radio enthusiasts and people of similar persuasions started putting up Internet-In-A-Box-style access points to share whatever data they had on hand.
Some of these access points were geared towards practical information and data, some were solely focused on entertainment, providing access to the owner's pirated media collection, and others were purely set up to share whatever data the owner had preserved from the old internet.
Eventually, businesses and other organizations would start putting up their own access points, providing local access to their services and information as well. People quickly latched onto the idea of local data sharing, and the phenomenon spread all across the system.
Eventually, some bored engineers at MIT, the last remaining university in The United State Of Boston, Massachusetts, would develop new networking hardware and software, specifically geared towards this use case. This was later standardized under the name MeshNet.
MeshNet nodes may offer various other services, such as messaging, bulletin boards, or access to the old internet. They will usually be connected to other nodes within reach to facilitate messaging. This is a manual process intended to force MeshNet node owners to interact with each other at least briefly. An added bonus is that it makes the Mesh much less interesting to the same commercial forces that caused the old internet to melt down.
Direct links between nodes are usually very low bandwidth and not suitable for anything beyond text messaging. They are also geographically limited, as a message will only travel across a certain number of nodes before expiring to prevent overloading the mesh.
Bigger nodes may sometimes use the old internet to connect to other nodes in remote locations, enabling communication across cities, countries, or even planets.
Diagrams showcasing different MeshNet connection strategies.
Left: Several clients connecting to a MeshNet node to retrieve information
*Middle: MeshNet nodes connecting locally to pass messages between clients*
*Right: Geographically separated MeshNet nodes using the old internet as a backhaul to allow clients connected to them to communicate across long distances*
Nowadays, a Valet may walk past a record store and suddenly start humming the free 30-second preview it downloaded of a new song it hadn't heard before.