[big_surprise]

  So the question is how do we democratize that?

Commenter wtracy has already linked to the FSF's list of High Priority Free Software Projects... From there, look into what they have to say about free wifi (and in particular, but not limited to the OrangeMesh package): http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-projects/free-software...

If a convincing case could be made that the benefits to National Security outweigh the costs to the copyright cartels, I'd be willing to bet that young secondary-schoolers would have a blast with a decently designed curriculum that includes a working student-to-student mesh-network as one of its goals.

[chewxy]

I actually meant democratizing the network effect that Medium has. The "free marketing" bit.

I mean, right now one can pretty freely go write up a blog using self-hosted wordpress, octopress, pelican, hugo or whatever. But choosing that over Medium can sometimes mean a lot more work to put in. But if we can democratize the ease-of-use and the good bits of Medium/Facebook/Twitter... Maciej's end statement about "using open standards, write text in text, images in images" would have been achieved.

The problem is that corporations now create a significantly more compelling version (in most criteria - UX, UI, etc) of the Free and Open versions out there.

[big_surprise]

Right, I got that. I guess I meant to say- start young. Provide a compelling alternative to ad-driven consumerism... Otherwise, it seems that you're just talking about creating another new corporation with an more compelling (even if nonsensical) reason to adopt.