Were you peering? I'm under the impression that they would not use an ISP connection for individuals. Thus, you would have no ISP account on which to receive copyright infringement notices.

Freifunk, a somewhat similar German project solves this by using a mesh VPN to tunnel traffic out.

why would i go through all this effort just to let some stranger torrent iron man on my internet account

Collective action can give all of us, including ourselves, more freedom. This isn’t about torrents, it’s about the freedom to use the internet without surveillance and monitoring of our every move.

Obligatory tragedy of commons reference

The tragedy of the commons is not a natural law.

It might be kinda something like a natural law:

- [Great Oxygenation Event - Wikiwand](https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Great_Oxygenation_Event)

The general idea of Meshnets worldwide is to turn 'my internet account' into 'our internet'.

all this effort = buying a router and plugging it into your computer.

Depending on your jurisdiction all this effort can also include legal fees, visits from the police and saying good bye to all electronic equipment for a couple of months while it's being investigated.

IIRC, also being registered as an ISP, giving them certain protections.

This isnt much of an issue now that NYC Mesh is providing egress in place of an ISP. There aren't many individuals left broadcasting their own ISP connection out.

It sounds like you were sharing your own ISP connection a while ago before this was the case, mightbyte?

It's been awhile, so you could be right. I just bought the router from the NYC Mesh people and hooked it up to my internet connection thinking it would be a nice way to give access to people in need and support what I consider to be a powerful idea and a worthy cause. It was never a big enough priority for me to put effort into figuring out precisely what was going on. If all NYC Mesh traffic in and out of my ISP goes through a VPN, maybe I should give it a try again.

Can you share any more detail about this? My impression was that anyone who shared another internet connection with the mesh does it through a VPN tunnel, so traffic exits through the mesh's PoP.