The Network of Alternative Social Media Researchers

Guifi: Mesh Networks, Persistence, and Lessons for ASM

RWG, 27 May 2026

Dr. Paloma Viejo Otero recently presented research (co-authored with Dr. Eugenia Siapera and Efrain Foglia ) at the Statecraft, Sovereignty, and Digital Governance symposium at Goldsmiths University of London. At the symposium, Paloma talked about Guifi.net, a longstanding mesh network in Spain. The following interview, conducted by Robert W. Gehl via email, is based on that presentation and on a conversation between Paloma and Robert at a pub after a day at the conference.

Hey, Paloma! I understand you want to include some other folks in the conversation. And did you get a chance to revisit the movie we talked about?

Paloma: Hi Rob, first and foremost, thanks a million for this interview and the conversation we held at the Pub. I actually rewatched Three Days of the Condor, which I do recommend to anyone who likes technology and secretly dreams of becoming Faye Dunaway. I hope you don’t mind that I have invited the coauthors of the article to answer your questions with me. Let me introduce them to you. I believe you already know Professor Dr. Eugenia Siapera from UCD, Ireland. Eugenia was my supervisor and we have continued naturally working together and colaborating. And let me introduce Efrain Foglia. Efrain currently works at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC) and he is one of the initiators of guifi.net. When I first met Efrain I referred to him as “founder of guifi.net” and quite sweetly he said to me: “It’s illogical to attribute the founding of community networks to specific individuals. Community networks’ potential can’t be attributed to specific individuals who founded them.” Might these words set the tone of this conversation.

Hi, Eugenia, Efrain! Thanks for joining. Let’s start with something simple. For those who aren’t familiar, what are mesh networks?  

Efrain: Mesh networks are network architectures where nodes (the users’ routers or antennas) do not simply receive a signal from a central provider but connect to one another. Each node acts as a relay, forwarding data in a decentralised manner. In the case of guifi.net, this allows the infrastructure to be the community itself: if one node goes down, the information finds another route through neighboring nodes, eliminating dependence on a single central tower.  

Paloma: Beyond the technical architecture Efrain describes, I see mesh networks and community-based networks as an unfinished conversation—one we need to recover. Between 2010 and 2015, the academic literature positioned mesh networks as the solution to the digital divide. They were a societal promise. The discourse centered on sovereignty, free networks, communal responsibility, knowledge development, skills-building, and participatory governance. Importantly, the infrastructure itself was conceived as something to be inhabited, not passively consumed.

But we know what happened: most communities were drawn into the orbit of Big Tech. The language shifted with them: inhabitants became users, agency became interaction. And academia, rather than sustaining this vision, narrowed its focus to critiquing Big Tech so intensely that I think we’ve actually perpetuated its importance rather than moved beyond it. This is precisely what Barbrook and Cameron argued against in the 90s:, that the Californian Ideology was just one option among others. So the suggestion is to revitalise earlier conversation about mesh networks and Community Based Networks.

Tell me more! What’s the history of these sorts of networks?  

Paloma: Have you read Armin Medosch’s latest published book? The Rise of the Networks Commons: A History of Community Infrastructure (2025) – I highly recommend it. It was found on Armin’s computer after he sadly passed. All his work is a legacy that gives us first hand insights into how these networks emerged.

The technology emerged out of curiosity, experimentation, rural areas where private investment did not arrived, and cheap housing. You see, I am currently in conversation with Jürgen Neumann, one of Freifunk’s initiators, and Medosch wrote about him: “After learning about WLAN, -Jürgen- built a wireless bridge to an ISP for his housing association and spread it around the block of the housing project he was living in” (33). In our conversation, Jürgen confirmed this and emphasised how the Berlin of the 2000s made this possible: “accessing the roofs of buildings was very easy back then, that’s where parties were happening, where neighbors got to know each other and where antennas were installed.” So long story short: I think the actual history of these sorts of networks inevitably starts with your neighbors. 

Efrain: The specifics of Guifi.net – it was born in 2004 in rural Catalonia, where major providers refused to invest because it wasn’t “profitable.” Neighbors began installing their own antennas to share connections. What started as a technical patch evolved into a social movement, proving that internet access can be managed as a commons. Bottom line: they emerged as a response to the digital divide and corporate control of telecommunications.

Guifi.net is an interesting case because there’s more than the underlying technology — there is a governance framework. Please tell me more about it.  

Efrain: The most innovative part isn’t the cabling, but the Open, Free, and Neutral Network Commons Agreement (XOLN). This governance framework ensures the network remains collective property. It stipulates that no one can appropriate the infrastructure, everyone has the right to connect, and management must be transparent. It is a “multi-actor” system where volunteers, public administrations, and local companies coexist, all abiding by the same rules of the commons. 

Paloma: And if I might add, it is an incredibly comprehensive document, crafted through the years and to a certain extent collectively. I am currently analysing it to both understand its insights, replicability, but also the extent of its Principle of Reciprocity. I will definitely tell you more when the analysis is done. I am immersed in it.

A question I always get about alternative social media (ASM) is: who is paying for it? How do they make money? Guifi.net must raise similar questions — how is it funded?

Efrain: Guifi.net operates on a collaborative investment model. Instead of paying a subscription to a multinational that extracts profit, users or entities invest in their own stretch of the network. Once the infrastructure is installed, maintenance costs are shared. There are also small local operators that charge for technical services, but a portion of that revenue is reinvested into the common network through a compensation table. It is a circular economy where value stays within the community rather than going to external shareholders. 

Paloma: and who is the community? you might ask, I have learn that in guifi.net the private investor are: your local bar, the bakery or the funeral home at the end of the street. This means we are not talking about a purely anti-capitalist commons network, but a community based network that have addapted to the domination of big tech.  

Paloma, in your presentation, you draw on a concept of persistence, a decolonial idea about generative adaptation to domination. What is the role of pedagogy, teaching, and training in persistence? Are you seeing “older” folks talking to “younger” folks when it comes to things like mesh nets or ASM?  

Paloma: Yes. In media and communications, “Persistence” typically refers to nostalgia—think of the camera shutter sound on your phone. Feminist tech discourse also uses it to mean enduring against tech industry culture. But I’m drawing from postcolonial and archaeological literature instead, basically Lee M. Panich book Narratives of Persistence (2020), where persistence means as you say “generative adaptation to domination.”

A personal example helped me to land what Panich poses as Persistence: My grandfather, David Otero, was a Republican. When Franco rose, my grandfather fought in the Spanish Civil War. He lost, and had to live under Franco’s regime. Though he contributed to scattered pockets of resistance at the very early stages he only resisted here and there, but persistenly continued his republican practices by for instance not stepping into any church in a Spain shaped by Franco’s Catholism and the Church’s population’s control. That is Persistence.

So when I apply this idea of Persistance into media and infrastructures, persistence becomes ”generative adaptation to big tech domination.” I think of it as silently constructing networks that do not serve the big tech gods or attend their churches.

Aditionally, there is also the temporal dimension of persistence. When studing community-based networks under the temporal and continutiy lense of persistence, something fundamental emerges: we remember that these networks exist today precisely because they began before big tech, and they are still operational despite big tech.

Efrain: Yes, Persistence is not just about resisting an attack; it is about enduring over time despite domination. Pedagogy is vital here: if technical knowledge is held by only a few “experts,” the network dies when they burn out. Persistence requires transferring knowledge from “veterans” (who understand the politics of the commons) to younger generations (who bring technical energy).

In guifi.net, “self-installation” workshops are pedagogical acts where people learn that the internet isn’t “magic” falling from the sky, but something you can build and repair yourself.

Eugenia: There is another element in Persistence: community tech and networks persist to the extent to which they serve their communities. I am thinking of Sarantoporo.gr, a community network initiative in a small rural area in Greece: this was set up in 2015, at the height of the debt crisis in Greece, and it is still going strong because it still serves the people in an area where there is no commercial investment or coverage. So here, Persistence involves continuing to serve the community, and in part this is accomplished through pedagogy, teaching others how to maintain and upgrade the network.

In terms of ASM, Paloma and I discussed how people don’t really seem to pay much attention to history. What is the value of a historical understanding of alternatives – including for scholars but also practitioners?  

Paloma:  I began the presentation at Goldsmiths refering to a conversation with Akin Olla, managing editor of Convergence magazine. Akin droped this line once: “in times of crisis people tend to seek catharsis, to start everything new, instead of organising around what already exists.” Well, I am observing an emergent narrative in media and communications field: the insistence that we must “use our imagination,” that “artists will save us.”… Yet this desire for ‘speculative’ newness arrives with an enormous material and environmental cost. And artists are not in any moral obligation to save us, anyway.

My proposal for the future of media and infrastrcture is different: my current proposal is to actually look back. To return to the conversations that were happening before big tech claimed everything—to use Marta G. Franco’s phrasing—stole everything from us. To understand how innvation do actually exist outside big tech. That’s where the value lies. Not in imagining what hasn’t been tried, but in remembering what already works and keep organising and contributing to it.

Efrain: History teaches us that current alternatives do not emerge from a vacuum; they are part of a genealogy of struggles for technological autonomy. Understanding the history of guifi.net allows scholars to see that technology is inherently political and helps practitioners realize that the problems we face today (centralization, surveillance) have been successfully challenged before. History prevents us from “reinventing the wheel” and offers hope by showing that sovereign infrastructures have been viable for decades.

What about “resistance”? Is resistance too much of a burden, while persistence is achievable?  

Eugenia: To me, and connected to the previous discussion of history, persistence is also about nurturing and caring for the community, looking at its needs and trying to meet them, not only technical, but in terms of housing and social needs. Reciprocity and care, as explained by Efrain and Paloma above, are fundamental to community networks and fundamental to how persistence works.

Efrain: Resistance is often reactive: you oppose something (a law, a corporation). This is exhausting. Persistence, on the other hand, is proactive: it is about creating your own worlds and keeping them alive. Instead of spending all its energy fighting Big Tech, guifi.net focuses on persisting by building its own alternative. Persistence is less epic but more effective in the long run because it turns the alternative into something everyday and sustainable.

What sorts of lessons might ASM scholars take from your research and work on Guifi.net?  

Efrain: The main lesson is that the infrastructure is the message. It is not enough to have an alternative social network if it runs on Amazon or Google servers. For an alternative to be real, it must be consistent across all layers: from the cables and antennas to the governance and the economic model. Guifi.net teaches us that success is not just measured by user count, but by the autonomy those users gain over their own digital lives.

Eugenia: I think that it is also important to revive a tradition that feels somewhat neglected (though I hope I am wrong on this!) which I trace back to the work of J.D. Downing on Radical Media, on the prefigurative role of radical media, building the communities that activists want to live in, and the technologies that meet their needs for autonomy and freedom.

Paloma: I am going to share my two lessons. First, the Principle of Reciprocity that is mentioned in the Neutral Network Commons Agreement (XOLN) also apply to academics. Second, Guifi.net teach us that alternatives are durable. We could shake the myth of ephimerality, look at alternatives in their comoslogical, organisational and technological continuities and explore the fact that we might not need to start everything from scrach but that the future of media and communications started 25 years ago.