I’ve “started” but only so far as working on my home lab/server and home network. In theory if I get everything setup in advance, it’s as simple as getting some high gain WiFi antennas and getting other people to put their routers in bridge mode and configuring them to extend my network.

That being said, I am building out my home server with this goal in mind. An effective mesh network will have multiple devices hosting redundant instances of all the services, and the more devices doing that the more resilient the network is. To that end I’ve taken to learning NixOS for the reproducibility. Because your system is declared in a single file, and hardware specific config is separated from that, I can turn any device into a node in the mesh simply by installing NixOS and pulling the config of an existing node.

Eventually I’d love to basically build my own routers from single board computers and high gain antennas that I can just give to people. Basically a plug and play, preconfigured device that will pickup the existing mesh, or create a new origin node if not in range.

The super long term dream or goal of this would be to include a very long range, slower connection between origins to trickle feed content changes. Depending on the dystopia we end up in, this could be done with crazy strong WiFi signals, radio, LoRa, or even (inspired by factorial logistics robots) gliders or drones that are themselves carrying mesh network nodes and fly over bubbles of mesh networks.

It’s all kind of a pipe dream, but I’m at least educating myself for a time where more people begin to realize the World Wide Web as we know it is crumbling.

See my reply to the other comment under mine. Though I’ll add I feel like I “got started” when I met a bunch of local amateur radio operators and we all got chatting about long distance, wireless data transfers, which would add a lot of resilience to a mesh system.