Welcome to January and 2021, TILvids community! Here we all are, despite one of the most memorable years of many of our lives. Certainly it was a challenging year for many, but it was also the year that TILvids was born, so I can find a positive there! Let’s take a look back at how things went during December, 2020, before we move on to the new year:

• We were very pleased to announce that the Pine64 Community reached out to see if they could make TILvids.com their official PeerTube instance, to which I emphatically approved. I’ve been a long-time supporter of what the Pine64 group is doing, and would enjoy nothing more than to have TILvids be part of their continued success. You can check out the Pine64 Community channel on TILvids here.

• We were joined by a new creator, Illustrate to Educate who is sharing some really great edutainment content about politics, technology, etc. Check them out if you haven’t already! And if you’re an edutainment creator looking to move to a more open video platform, don’t hesitate to send a message to me!

• Speaking of creators, I wanted to highlight some of our most active video contributors! GeoTech, PizzaLovingNerd, and Tyler’s Tech always have some great Linux and open-source perspectives. Vex0r always brings it strong with fun retro-tech videos. Athena Productions has some fantastic mythology episodes, and Always Asking has some great videos pondering the big mysteries of life. And finally, The Attic Dwellers always delivers on the 80s nostalgia. Thanks to everyone for sharing your wonderful stories!

• In-between running the site, promoting videos, looking for new creators, and everything else, I was able to squeeze out a video of my own! I’m a huge advocate of open-source/open-web and data privacy, so I decided to make a list of the open projects that are having the biggest influence on my life at the moment. Check out my Top Data Privacy Tech for 2021 video!

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of January 1st, 2021, we currently have 48,426 video views, 394 users, and 115GB of local videos.

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

• Trying to get the community to start helping out with promoting TILvids. As you’re all aware, TILvids completely runs on donations and all of that money goes to running/growing the server. As such, with there being no marketing budget, all marketing is done at a grass-roots level. The biggest thing you can do is find a video you love on TILvids once a week, and share it out on social media. Reddit is a great place (because so many videos on the site work in different subs), but Mastodon, Twitter, and other places are great as well. This is where a huge chunk of my time is spent, and anything I can offload here will give me more time, and help our community grow more quickly!

• Making content. I love making videos, but have very little spare time for it. I do have one video already in the hopper, focused on the importance of infrastructure investment. I have about 25 other video topics ready, I just need to find some time to work on them!

• Continuing to advocate for the open-web. I’ve been finding and sharing articles that talk about how unhealthy YouTube is for online video. I think it’s incredibly important for our community to talk about these things, because they will help guide how we grow our own community, and become a voice that helps others learn about why this is important.

I think that’s it for now! As I said before, this was a challenging year for everyone, so I wish all the best to you and your circle of friends/family. A new year is a chance for a fresh start, and I hope that this year is full of potential and new opportunities for everyone. One of the reasons I picked edutainment as the main focus for TILvids is because I believe learning is the most valuable tool we as humans have at our disposal. It’s how we grow and advance, and it’s how we learn to understand each other. I think the content we have in this community is a great example of that, and I always look forward every day to seeing what new content people are sharing!

Thanks for helping me build a great community here, let’s keep it going!