Promoting NodeBB/fedi to city-scale organizations

[julian@activitypub.space]

@johannab@cosocial.ca asks:

> NodeBB strikes me as the best aligned of the extant platforms for municipal governments. Here's a question for julian: is he prepared for, or interested in, a promotion program to city-scale organizations?

To which I answered, simply: "Yes."

Now that I have the time to expand on my answer:

Yes, absolutely! There is definitely a space for municipal city-scale adoption of the fediverse through properties that they alone control, but federate widely. I imagine a local-fedi where my mayor posts via marianne@burlington.ontario.gc.ca, and she can talk to her constituents on neighbourhood-level instances like tyandaga.social or aldershot.space, or anybody worldwide via the power of the fediverse.

Right now we're in the unfortunate position where the city is posting notices to X/Twitter, and cross-posting to Facebook and Instagram. I would bet a lot of money most other municipalities are doing the exact same thing. Adding in the fediverse should be straightforward, and I welcome any opportunity to make it happen.

Let's make some connections!

[informapirata@activitypub.space]

In Italy, we've attempted this experiment at https://citiverse.it, which we haven't yet adequately promoted. However, it's a NodeBB instance designed primarily to create an alternative to local Facebook groups. The entire first section is made up of categories hierarchically coordinated by regions, cities, provincial capitals, and localities.
Thanks to NodeBB's features, we were able to begin capturing some posts from the Fediverse, especially from Mastodon, and some categories have finally been populated by actual users who decided to mention them directly from the Fediverse or who signed up to the forum to publish new posts.

We don't claim to be the official forum for all Italian communities. But the greatest advantage NodeBB offers is that if one day someone were to decide to create an entire forum dedicated to a region or a single city, we could simply deactivate that category or subcategory and link the newly created category as a remote category.
All this has been possible thanks to the fact that in just over a year, NodeBB has become a fantastic and extremely versatile tool.