besides just getting backups going of all the previous data troves that the subreddit have enumerated, I was wondering what the best resources are for databases of all local governments. currently, I’ve found these: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/max-mind/world-cities-database https://www.census.gov/data/datasets/2020/econ/local/public-use-datasets.html
imho, there could be a much more unified global dataset of all publicly available IRL communities, feel free to sanity check this.
There’s also this site to browse communities