A combination of entirely predictable capitalist monopolies, increasingly tight domestic regulation of service & hosting providers, international treaties designed to quickly /dev/null "undesirable" websites, and a new generation of packet-inspecting AI means that one is no longer free to just log on and use or invent whatever new protocol. Sure you can still play new games, or type whatever you want and put it on a website, and there are a hundred billion gimmicky micro-transactional behavioral sinks available to the majority of humanity, but it's all funneled into an umbilical cable in Moloch's crotch and from there to one of dozens of commercially available modern equivalents to the primitive old NSA PRISM.
Posters of 2020, what is the state of the art in community/decentralized WiFi/Cell networks?
Where is it going right, where is it going wrong, what are common challenges or standout cases in implementation? Knowledge of non-capitalist network balloons especially welcome since they seem on paper to cut around some of the bullshit required for towers.
Sub ghz in general is great for pirate signals, for example depending on what you're doing you can even ditch the protocols and send short bursts of data at prearranged "random" times. Stuff like that can be pretty hard to pick out from noise, rather than relying entirely on encryption in a longer packet.