I remember hearing about this in reports from major hurricanes in the South. Sounds pretty horrifying to be stranded on a roof or floating around on your own makeshift raft and then happening upon one of these ant rafts of doom.

Edit: thanks for the nightmares everyone. That’ll teach me to read Lemmy right before bedtime.

Agreed. I don’t think I explained myself clearly enough: I want them to have a presence online. Among the reasons being exactly what you’re pointing out. However, I think at least for smaller cities with very little staff, it’s not realistic to ask them to literally self-host it (as in having a server on-prem running it). I would be fine with them outsourcing it or cloud-hosting it under their own domain. A potential solution for the small ones could be something like a state-level hosted service where municipalities can sign up and get their own accounts, for example. That would work even for something like Rittman, Ohio pop. 6,131.

Yep. That’s what I meant. I want them to come to the fediverse but I don’t necessarily want the city’s IT admin to manage it between fighting laser printers.

Not so sure I want them to self host, just based on their track record for security, but I would like them to be more visible.

Also news outlets could benefit from doing this instead of us having to rely on repost automation.

I would also love to see peertube become more competitive to YouTube. It would probably need some kind of revenue sharing model or donation integration for that though.