I am seeing if I can persuade myself that digital communications
protocols run over amateur radio bands might be a good thing for me to
get into. Maybe some of you guys can usefully comment.

My skills, inclinations and circumstances, which I'd probably be
wasting readers' time to go into, make it fairly clear to me that if I
were to get into amateur radio, mostly I'd interested in running an
AX.25 node that talks IP and mostly runs unattended.

So, the obvious question is, to what extent is it legally possible,
and useful to others, to do that? If both possible and useful (but
how? running a local-weather-data server? better connectivity for
everyone through another node being around?), maybe I could do some
good by studying over coming months to get started.

-- Mark