Welcome to November, TILvids community! Hopefully everyone had a very happy Halloween! We’re on month two of me hitting these updates on the first day of the month, so off to a good start! Let’s see where things stand.

Some of the main highlights in October:

• Just squeaking in under the wire, we added another monthly donor to help support the community. Please send a big thanks to Geoflly Adonias (gadonias.com) for their contribution. TILvids completely relies on the community to help pay for monthly server costs, and more donors means we can expand storage space, add processors to transcode content more quickly, etc. If you’d like to help support the community, you can do so here.

• A number of new creators joined us in October. This includes Broke History, Vex0r, Athena Productions, and TheRetroPerspective! Thanks for sharing your wonderful content with the community, and welcome aboard!

• Speaking of creators, I also try to add my own content to the site (when I have time). This month I added a number of TILvids exclusives to the site, including a history of Nextcloud, essential software tools of 90s kids, and a video all about data privacy and self-hosting. Hopefully you’re enjoying this content, and depending on how much time I have available, I hope to continue making more!

• After a good discussion about using NewPipe to view TILvids content on Android mobile devices by /u/nebious I decided to make a quick video showing how to do it. This has gotten a decent amount of views, and has brought some great awareness to TILvids, NewPipe, and PeerTube in general. I’d call that a win! Thanks Nebious for kicking that all off!

• I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of November 1st, 2020, we currently have 28,675 video views, 239 users, and 81.8GB of local videos.

Here’s what I’m hoping to work on during November:

• I’m really hoping to continue getting more and more people to join /r/tilvids We started October at 58 users, and we’re starting November at 178. That’s a GREAT increase in users, and I’d love to see that continue. This is important because if you are subscribed to this sub, you will see the “TILvids video of the day” post that I put out daily, and it helps people remember to visit the site. So if you’re looking for a way to help TILvids grow, please share this community around Reddit with others. This is one of the most useful things that you, a member of the TILvids community, can do.

• On to Mastodon, I decided to start posting the video of the day there as well. Thanks to a major shout-out from FediFollows (@FediFollows@mastodon.online), we picked up a pretty big following over there. I was initially disappointed because I wasn’t getting any traction from the Mastodon community (which I truly want to support), so that was very exciting to see, and I’m happy to be able to support yet another open-web technology!

• For server resources, we’re doing alright for the moment. I upgraded the storage as-planned last month, and that should hold us for another month or two. We’re still fortunately just barely adding donors fast enough to offset the costs, but that will have to continue to scale going forward. This is very important, because it’s the foundation of being able to run the site without data-harvesting video ads on every video.

• I’m still constantly trying to find new creators. If you guys run across anyone that you feel would be a good fit for our edutainment video community, you can send them my way, or even better, contact them yourself! It carries so much more weight when one of their viewers/fans asks them to share their content elsewhere. You can send them to the site, to this sub, or have them email creators [at] tilvids [d0t] com.

I think that’s it for now. Thank you SO MUCH to the wonderful, growing TILvids community. I can’t express enough how much joy it brings me to see this community continuing to grow. I have wanted to find a way to share information with the world while supporting open-source and open-web at the same time, so this is truly a passion-project for me. Every day brings some new source of excitement and interest, and I thank you all for that. Please continue to share the community with others and post here to share ideas on how to make this an even better experience!