OP here. I find more than 4 hops impracticable. That's not what I was suggesting in the article. I suggested (probably not clearly enough) three ways meshes can be efficient: (1) local-first social networking where the use case is "download latest updates and read later" much more than it would be like instant messaging, (2) gossip, the eventual propagation of data over long distances, (3) satellite-based meshes to cover large distance hops.