Reticulum (https://reticulum.network/) seems to have quite a community with global chatrooms and local communities (saw at least US, Germany, Italy), seems like a more scalable solution than meshtastic imo.
I am planning to write my MSc thesis about the currently broad topic "Future of Open Web. Since I work at a contextual targeting company, I have also aggregated data about traffic to some news sites & contacts in the industry for interviews.
Any particularly interesting angles to this that you wished there was research on?
I've been living in Finland for several years, and learning Finnish has been an uphill battle. Almost all Finns in capital area speak very good English, and they often switch to English if they feel that I am struggling to form a sentence. It doesn't help that Finnish is not an Indo-European language.
One thing that stuck was watching Finnish movies in cinema with English subtitles, and having Finnish as my phone's system language. Also, in-person courses. I agree with others that consistent exposure seems to be crucial, but when work is entirely in English it is surprisingly hard to have constant exposure even when living in the country.