Welcome to May 2022, TILvids community! Let’s take a look at what was happening at TILvids over the last month:

• If you’ll remember last month, I mentioned that we’d be looking to migrate to a new server host, and I’m happy to say that I was able to successfully perform the migration earlier this month. It wasn’t without its hiccups; immediately upon pointing the DNS to the new site, I noticed a number of elements that I missed during the copy process. Oops. At any rate, with some help from the community, and with some late-night troubleshooting, everything was straightened out. This migration should help a lot to not only reduce costs a bit (at least for now), but will also give us more storage space, allowing for more content! The only major issue is that the server is hosted in Germany as opposed to Canada now, so streaming performance is a bit slower for our western-hemisphere users. More on that below…

• A very happy welcome to new TILvids creator Veronica Explains! We’re excited and thankful to have new creators sharing with the TILvids community. Welcome aboard!

• In case you missed it this month, with the announcement of Elon Musk acquiring Twitter, the Mastodon community saw a large influx of new users. As supporters of the decentralized movement, this is fantastic news, and we were happy to see so many new users, and give a warm welcome to the many who followed us on Mastodon. A billionaire buying walled-garden social media communities isn’t going to make the world a better place, that will only come from the decentralization of the Internet, so keep pushing!

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of May 1st, 2022, we currently have 108,728 video views, 1,582 users, and 198GB of local videos. It’s worth keeping in mind that many instances don’t clear out the spam accounts, but I do try to keep on top of that, which is deflating our total number of users (but is, in my mind, very much worth it).

Here are a few thoughts for June:

• As mentioned above, with the migration of the site to a new host, we have seen some slowdowns for users in the western-hemisphere (though, happily, some speed increases for those in Europe). One thing I’d like to look into is building a pseudo-CDN by spinning up a mirror server in the western-hemisphere. I’ve done a few tests so far but haven’t made any real progress. My hope is to continue working toward that going forward.

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