Welcome to February 2021, TILvids community! It’s hard to believe we’re already a month into the year, but time just continues marching on! Let’s take a look at what was happening at TILvids over the last month:

• We welcomed some new contributors to our community! If you haven’t checked out their videos yet, Slope’s Game Room has some excellent video game history videos, Infosec Bytes has some great privacy tips (always near and dear to my heart), Two-Minute Bioengineering has joined us to share some really interesting science-future videos, and the always-insightful GDQuest has graciously permitted us to re-share their content with the TILvids community! Welcome to everyone, and thanks for sharing your great content!

• Speaking of great contributors, we continue to have lots of activity from site favorites, including Vex0r, PizzaLovingNerd, GeoTech, Athena Productions, and others!

• The Pine64 community shared a great monthly update of their own, so check that out if you missed it! TILvids continues to proudly support the Pine64 community as their official PeerTube video host. We love supporting great open-source projects and communities, so if you know of any other exciting projects looking for a more open, privacy-respecting home for their videos, point them in our direction!

• As usual, the struggle continues to find time to put out our own exclusive content, but I was able to sneak in one video this month: Building the Future: What History Can Teach Us About Infrastructure Investment. I do hope to try to put out at least one exclusive per month.

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of February 1st, 2021, we currently have 56,613 video views, 468 users, and 129GB of local videos.

For February, I’m continuing to focus on a few things:

• Shortly after posting this message, I’ll be updating the PeerTube software that runs TILvids to version 3.0.1. Assuming all goes well, it should only take about 10 minutes or so. This will bring live-streaming capabilities to TILvids. I’m unsure of how I want this to play into the site (or if the server can even support it), so feel free to leave your thoughts and feedback about it.

• After many months of basically having to run the site as a one-man-band, I’m finally starting to see folks talk about TILvids, join this sub-reddit, share links, and of course upload video content. I can’t understate how wonderful this is to see, if means that people are enjoying the community, which is excellent. Please keep it up, and tell your friends, encourage more creators to join, share links…it’s all great!

• We are nearing the point where we’re going to need more storage space on the server. Our excellent patrons are doing great to keeping costs at bay, but there will come a point where costs are going to eclipse donations again. If you enjoy using the site, and want to help it grow, feel free to donate to our Patreon. As you know, there are no video ads or data harvesting on the site, and the site runs by the generous donations of the community. Thank you so much to everyone already donating, every little bit helps!

I think that’s it for now! Thanks so much to everyone for continuing to watch, comment, share, and join this adventure we’re all on together! Every day, I wake up excited to find out what new things await us on TILvids!