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.

I guess you're not into networking? If so, perhaps what seems obvious to me isn't obvious to you: the network is the toy. Building it is the game. The purpose isn't the things you can do with it, it's how you do them and who you do them with. Two cans and a piece of string is still fun in the age of cellphones, and a treehouse is still fun to be in when you have a nice living room with a telly.

If the idea of setting up one of these doesn't sound like fun in its own right, I wouldn't recommend attempting it.

You might just want to look at setting up a friends only WireGuard, or Tailscale network.

You could play any game on it. How's that?