Well for lack of a better comparison, it’s kind of like a Trump rally. Not quite, of course, the style Trump applies is tailored to the current American sensibilities, with his silly little dances and whatnot. But the way he wields anger and hate and “patriotism” to get a rise out of the crowd seems very much alike. And yeah, it’s sadly undeniable that Hitler had a talent for this. Greater one than Trump maybe.

$ tar -h; echo $?
tar: You must specify one of the '-Acdtrux', '--delete' or '--test-label' options
Try 'tar --help' or 'tar --usage' for more information.
2
$

Lemon squeezy.

can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.

Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!

The conditions range from very broad, like “fix bugs” (curl), over somewhat specific like “improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG” (Wireguard), to very specific like “create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality” (ActivityPub).

You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don’t really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as “Digital Sovereignty”, basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I’m outside of Canada and the US, I’d say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

They never saw the message, they saw anon disconnecting, anon saw them disconnecting. Behind the scenes Blizzard made them shadow-ban each other, they will never share the same server shard again. Both sides think they won and Blizzard will continue taking money from both. /conspiracy