Of course, Alabama school, it’s entirely possible that the lesson was complete nonsense.

Nah, from a solely US perspective it’s correct. There were ~1.6 million military casualties in the civil war, and ~1.07 million in WW2. But there were a few more parties involved in WW2, so it’s kind of weird to frame it as less bloody. If you include civilians, estimates range from 70 to 85 million dead worldwide (not including the >20 million wounded soldiers and unknown number of wounded civilians).

Ohhh, that’s what they meant. Thanks for clearing that up, I was really confused by that unexpected US defaultism.

The US Civil War eclipsed both in the number of casualties.

Uhh what? Wikipedia says ~1.6 million casualties (including wounded, ~650k dead) in the civil war, while WW2 has 24 million military deaths alone.

Indeed. We shall find out it seems.

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.

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.