It's just like how we once used UUCP and Fidonet for email / news / message boards to remote systems that only had intermittent dialup connectivity in the 1980s and 1990s. Pockets of local communities would pool together to share a single system that would make the long distance calls to another city to send and receive messages. That really helped when long distance cost $0.34/minute and could be shared by hundreds of end users.