>As I see it now, even if the problems described in the article are real, the great majority of people don't care enough to make the effort required to change their habits.

Then it's not solving any immediate problems for them. Anyway - people get obsessed with getting the entire planet on to distributed networks. IMO that's not realistic - the mass population is always going to choose simple, corporate shit unless there's a direct need for something disruptive enough that they'll spend literally days working out how to do it - eg learning how to find and download torrents.

>Looking back at the time this article was written, I used to believe the same things, that people would rise up, mesh networks were going to change the world, and the distributed web was going to change everything.

It won't change everything but I think it will become important. General purpose computing will continue it's dying path and in 10-15 years, normies will be solely on their smartphone walled gardens and programmers, scientists, muckrakers, enthusiasts etc will populate some kind of very niche darknet (<5% population) - or an array of totally disparate darknets aligned to various niches - whether theyr'e running over the Internet proper or some kind of alt network.