What would you do with a community meshnet?

With all the discussion recently on community meshnets as an alternative to the Internet. Assume a meshnet local to you was up and operating. What would day-to-day use of a network like this look like? If I had a low bandwidth connection to all my neighbors, I can't imagine a scenario where it would be useful.

There was already an established example of community run private networks with BBSs and they were absolutely destroyed by consumer adoption of internet services. What could be done differently with meshnets to make them more appealing?