Welcome to August 2021, TILvids community! Let’s take a look at what was happening at TILvids over the last month:

• First up: The TILvids blog! As you hopefully have noticed (by virtue of being here), last month I created a dedicated blog for TILvids. I had been using Reddit previously to post updates, but have received many requests to have a more dedicated location for the blog, so that it’s easier to find and share the content. Mission accomplished!

• For those of you unaware, we have a Discord Community. We also have a Matrix Chatroom. However, both of those communities were siloed off from each other, and the conversations existed in a vacuum. Thanks to some good work from the Matrix crew, we were able to set up a bridge so that communication in either of the communities now shows up in both places. Thanks especially to @random_guy524 for helping to get all of that going!

• Thank you to all of the creators sharing their content with the TILvids community! This past month, we saw excellent videos shared by Linux Lounge, Pizza Loving Nerd, GeoTech Digital, JBriones95, Athena Productions, ToggleJam, Tim Krief, The Pine64 Community. So many interesting videos shared, ranging from tech, to science, to history, and lots of other subjects in-between. Thanks for keeping the TILvids community entertained!

• Also, a special shout-out to The Attic Dwellers. Not only are they long-time content contributors to TILvids (they are one of the oldest channels!) but they also began donating to our Patreon! This is absolutely critical, because as we add more content creators, the cost to run the site continues to climb. If you’re interested in helping to support the community, feel free to help donate to TILvids! Thank you so much to The Attic Dwellers! 🙌

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of August 1st, 2021, we currently have 83,456 video views, 897 users, and 167GB of local videos.

Here are a few thoughts for August:

• One of the surest signs of a growing community includes a growing number of spam accounts, and I’m “happy” to say we’ve made it to the big leagues. There has been a noticeable uptick in the number of spam accounts created. To that end, I opted to enable email verification for new accounts. This has slowed the number of spam accounts considerably, however some still do trickle through. If you watch the user numbers and notice them fluctuate up and down, this is just a result of me “cleaning house” every so often.

• That said, we continue to creep closer to the big 1,000 mark for users! From time to time, I check out where TILvids stands on the PeerTube Instances List for total users, and it’s been fun to watch us rise up the charts (currently sitting at #30). As always, please continue to spread the word online! Every month our community continues to grow, and this just makes it easier to convince new creators to give it a shot. If you want to see TILvids continue to get new creators, sharing the site is the best way to do it!

I think that’s it for now! Thanks so much to everyone for continuing to watch, comment, share, and support the TILvids community! ❤️