Reticulum (https://reticulum.network/) seems to have quite a community with global chatrooms and local communities (saw at least US, Germany, Italy), seems like a more scalable solution than meshtastic imo.
I am planning to write my MSc thesis about the currently broad topic "Future of Open Web. Since I work at a contextual targeting company, I have also aggregated data about traffic to some news sites & contacts in the industry for interviews.
Any particularly interesting angles to this that you wished there was research on?