Disclaimer: I'm creator of a mesh network, or a decentralised, anonymous 'reddit' called Aether.[0] [1] I'm probably biased.<p>The main problem with these networks is not the declining user interest per se, it's rather that they are by their own nature, a) very hard to engineer, and b) almost impossible to monetise. The engineering effort required to make a decentralised network reach resilience (and visible uptime) of the most basic Rails web app on Heroku is orders of magnitude away from just hosting it.<p>For A, Decentralisation is a cruel mistress; every assumption you will make about computers connecting to your network will slowly fall apart as you move deeper into the architecture, engineering and design of your services—that makes it a fascinating challenge as much as a hard one fortunately. On the more unfortunate side, you eventually end up with cases that require you to entirely reëngineer your stack to provide for them; and not providing them access is philosophically against the democratic access decentralisation offers. For starters, anything higher than C/C++ is probably a non–starter, a lesson I learned the hard way. My own work is built in Python and getting it to perform adequately well on even most medium–grade computers has been a challenge. Distributed network means distributed loads, and there is a significant amount of computers who aren't able to pull their own weight on the Internet, especially in the developing world.<p>It also means that you'll be bogged down with a lot of platform support issues, small bugs etc.<p>For B, there are two issues. The first issue is that in a decentralised network it's almost impossible to target a specific person or entity to pay if you're not willing to create an exception for yourself (i.e. all computers able to call your servers, and consequently in absence of your servers the network goes down) but if you're willing to do that, you can just make it into a traditional system in the first place, and you just made it both subject to your whims, and as fragile as any other centralised service. That's a no-go.<p>Beyond this, the moral imperative is that you <i>shouldn't</i> be charging for a service that doesn't cost you money to maintain. For additional services, sure, but you still need to figure out how to attach an additional service without which the core network continues to function.<p>In general, it's a massive engineering task that isn't lucrative, and the effort required to maintain and keep functional increases exponentially as the network scales. For me, I'm stuck at packaging the new version for the last few months because PyInstaller doesn't like the way I split Aether into two applications—and you end up with these corner cases nobody on the entire Internet has ever encountered before. There's no Stack Overflow for that. It's fun, but it's also tiring.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be-a-reddit-for-the-privacy-conscious" rel="nofollow">http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/27/5150758/aether-aims-to-be...</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.getaether.net" rel="nofollow">http://www.getaether.net</a>