Probably because I'm in the same camp as the person you originally responded to. It's an intriguing project and clearly a lot of effort has gone into it so I'm left wondering about how it's being used. If I were going to build something similar (as they advocate) what might I use it for?

> around half of the people on the LAN have thermal receipt printers with open access, for printing out quips or jokes on each other’s counters.

> there’s a 3-node IRC network, exotic hardware to gawk at, radios galore, a NAS storage swap, LAN only email, and even a SIP phone network of “redphones”.

The above is from the linked essay about the current sordid state of the internet. It gives a few ideas for fun pastimes but honestly not a lot. Gaming with close friends is probably the majority of what I'd use a LAN setup like this for so naturally I'm left curious what I might be missing out on.