What is the point of creating such network if it is for the benefit of just a few ?
If 1% of the population can have free speech, but the rest of them don't, nothing will change...
2. if you learn of others with meshnets, you can then peer to the other group, then you're all linked together. Repeat.
3. The steps you just did, those can be automated so that you automatically peer with the whole planet. However, that's complicated to build. But it's being built. Join HypeIRC #qmai or #cjdns to discuss. To join hype IRC you need to peer with the Hyperboria meshnet, as HypeIRC is not broadcast to the Internet. There are links to public IRCs to find peers if you know none (start at http://projectmeshnet.org). You're free to automate this with your own group of trusted peers too. Hope to see you on HypeIRC soon.
Private meshes usage doesn't grant mass media attention so I don't see why a bunch of hackers communicating freely on their little line grant them a better "free speech to change things" than the other 99%. Private meshes aren't tools to raise awareness but tools to have a different network. It all depends on the message you want to send and the recipients you want to reach.
Right now private meshes users are much less than 1% of the population anyway.
But it could grow fast in dense urban zone. I can foresee some weekends of hacking and configuring routers at home for the coming months.
Of course the bandwidth will be nothing like what ISP can offer.
What concerns me is how highly vulnerable to RF disruption some of those projects relying on WiFi are. This is a serious problem if you are trying to communicate vital information in a country where the government is hell-bent on not letting citizens set up counter-revolt or grass-root movements because it'll actually be very cheap to disturb those signals (I may be wrong but from what I understand of WiFi freq. range it's easy to neutralize a network by flooding it with interference).
edit: But maybe we don't need 24/7 availability for those kind of network usage. Well-organized revolutionary and underground movements might not need a youtube or facebook uptime.
Plenty of WIFI networks are sub-optimal because the people implementing them don't know what they're doing with channels and power etc. I'm worried that meshnet activism will attract many people who are keen but not clueful.
See also "IETF Attendees Re-Engineer Hotel WIFI" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3771876) (https://www.networkworld.com/news/2012/032812-ietf-makeover-...)
I agree that it feels like jamming WIFI would be trivially easy for people with even moderate skills and resources.