As a knowledgeable internet consumer, I come to it with the general question, "What would such a mesh network do for me?" to which the only answer seems to be, "It gives me the fascinating task of buying a router and flashing its firmware and writing its config file, all based on sketchy jargon-filled docs."
Supposing I do that, and in the highly unlikely outcome that I don't screw it up, I will then have -- what, exactly? Besides a nonstandard router?
Supposing there existed a libremesh network in my city. Not impossible. How would I know? Could I use it to access internet content?
Another crucial question not answered is, how is a local mesh supposed in any way to be a circumvention of the traffic-shaping that we all fear the telecoms will do, now they aren't common carriers? Yeah, to the extent that a whole neighborhood is meshed up, you could have free and unfettered exchange of email and FTP among all your neighbors.
Yippee.
The content that an internet consumer really wants, and which occupies 99.9% of the bits she consumes, comes from the major sites that are out there on the backbone of the net. Ninety-nine percent of what the edge users of a mesh want to pull from their mesh connections originates far outside the neighborhood. And it has to enter the local mesh from an internet access point that is sourced by one of those big bad telecoms.
A neighborhood mesh looks like a fine way for a neighborhood to organize block parties and garage sales, but it really is just a way to share access to some ports to the same un-neutral internet everyone else uses. Except you've added a random number of local wireless hops to every ping.