TILvids Blog

TILvids Update - July 2023

2023-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

It’s been a while since I’ve done a blog update, so I thought I’d take a few minutes to update thoughts I’ve been continuing to have, about where I hope to evolve TILvids to going forward. If that sounds interesting to you, keep reading (and if not, well, thanks for stopping by).

HUB AND SPOKE MODEL If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you’ll know that my intention is to eventually create a hub-and-spoke model for TILvids; that is to say, I want to create a community that has a centralized entrance point instance that branches out to many connected satellite instances. These satellite instances will be run by creators who have come up through the TILvids community, or have been vetted by members of our community to indicate their goals are in alignment with our mission to provide quality edutainment content to the world.

There are a few reasons I think this model makes sense:

Resources. Running a large video community is incredibly resource intensive, and it’s mostly a problem of scale. When I started TILvids, I had roughly 40GB of storage space on a VPS, almost no traffic, no CDN consideration, and zero backup plan; hosting this was incredibly simple. As the site has continued to grow, it’s required more storage, addition of a CDN, and multiple backup strategies. I’ve been able to continue to scale so far, but there will come a point where this is no longer feasible, short of becoming a for-profit entity like YouTube, which runs counter to everything I want out of TILvids, and the spirit of the PeerTube community. By capping the direct growth of TILvids, it means there is a ceiling to the centralized resources required to run the entry-point of the community, and instead those resources can be distributed and shared amongst the creator community.
Creator control. As a creator of content myself, I’m incredibly empathetic to our creator community. As a creator using YouTube, or any medium you don’t directly control, one of the scariest thoughts to contend with is “What happens if my content disappears?” Maybe you keep backups of your content itself, but what about your network of followers? In a centralized model like YouTube, you lose all of that. If TILvids were to follow a similar model, attempting to become a centralized platform, then the same thing could happen, even if we hope never to do that. So, by encouraging creators to grow up through a semi-centralized entry-point like TILvids, our creator community gets a chance to grow and evolve with and from our community, and then when they become large enough, that community becomes part of them on their own instance. And as stated before, the complexities of running a smaller instance are much fewer than trying to run one massive instance (and it’s also something I hope a team at TILvids can help creators with as well).

The specifics of what this look like continue to evolve, but the sentiment behind it remains the same, based on the two points above. We need a way to scale in an ethical way, and we need to ensure creators retain control of both their content and their community.

ON FEDERATION I frequently have to field an answer to the question “Why don’t you just federate with all the other instances?” At a high-level, the answer is pretty simple: The mission for our instance is quality edutainment, and most other instances don’t align with that mission. So many instances act as general content instances, which more often than not leads to them being inundated with conspiracy-theory nonsense, crypto-scam videos, and just downright spam. This has started to generate the perception that PeerTube in a dumping-ground for anyone who was de-platformed by YouTube, rather than a federated community of content-creators.

At a more nuanced level, considering the hub-and-spoke model I’m looking to build, I do think it’s important for there to be a smaller number of well-defined entry-points for the PeerTube ecosystem. The best way to do that, at least in my opinion, is for these entry-points to be very selective on who they federate with, where their content shows up, etc. The world has been conditioned to only having a few centralized ecosystems for video (YouTube, Tik-Tok, etc) and trying to explain the concept of a federated ecosystem of video content simply doesn’t work. Rather, if you can say to your friend “Hey, do you like edutainment content? You should check out TILvids!” and have them hit this one entry-point, that’s a much easier proposition. The hard work of understanding and implementing federation should happen transparently in the background so that the general world can simply have a few easy entry-points to the content they want to enjoy.

Most of the time, when I explain this to people, they get it. The folks in our community love that they know what type of content to expect on our instance, and creators like that they don’t have to worry about their content showing up on other instances that they don’t approve of. For the few people left that don’t agree…I get it, and it is what it is. I’ve been a part of the Linux and general FOSS world for decades, and we’re not always going to all see eye-to-eye.

ON MONETIZATION One of the biggest hurdles to getting creators on-board with alternative platforms is monetization. There are a few awesome creators out there like Nick from The Linux Experiment who are happy to take a chance on federated video simply to support it, but many other creators simply do not care; they want to make content, and make some money in doing so. I get it.

So this is a problem to solve. Additionally, as we scale, we likely will get to a point where community donations won’t be able to cover all the costs. To this end, at some point I think TILvids will need some source of additional revenue. I very much prescribe to the idea of ads being the original sin of the Internet, and believe the worst thing we could do is what the existing video ecosystems do: mine personal data of our users in order to serve targeted ads during videos. That’s not respectful of our users, and is just a poor user experience to boot.

I think a better approach is instance-sponsoring. I’ve long been a fan of PBS (Public Broadcasting System in the US) and how they have no paid commercials, and instead have a mix of viewer support and corporate sponsorship. I’d like to eventually have something similar for TILvids, where the community continues to support us, but we also have a handful of sponsors that donate to the instance and are called out in some way. I’m not sure what exact for this would take (something respectful and tasteful). If you’re a company that thinks this might be interesting, feel free to reach out and we can talk about what that could look like.

In the meantime, our community support continues to drive our ability to run the site, so thank you to all our patrons!

ON INCORPORATION I’ve said before that one of my goals is to eventually incorporate TILvids as a not-for-profit. This is very important, because it removes the temptation to pursue monetization tactics that do not respect our community of viewers and creators. Additionally, if we want TILvids to be a semi-centralized entry-point to a broader world, I think it’s important to not be an entity driven by profit.

I think a very healthy end-state for TILvids would be to employ many dozens of people that help to keep the site running, keep the mission of the entry-point clear, help moderate the community, help new creators grow, and help established creators transition to a spoke in the hub. And these folks should all earn enough to have a good living, without some CEO or board member earning massive amounts of money off the backs of everyone else.

So that’s an update on where my head is at for all things TILvids. I don’t have all the answers, and to be honest, I’m often still trying to come up with the questions. But at the core of all of this, I want to build a video ecosystem that respects both our users and our creators in a way that allows us all to grow ethically together. Thanks for everyone that has, and continues to support that mission!

TILvids Update - January 2023

2022-12-30T00:00:00+00:00

TILvids 2023: Musings for a New Year

What a crazy year 2022 has been for tech. As we approached the last few weeks of the year, I kept thinking how different this year has felt. For most of the last two decades, it’s seemed like the trajectory of the tech industry has been very much on the rails; processors get faster, devices get both smaller and more powerful, everything moves to the web or mobile, and a handful of very large tech companies are adored by both Wall Street and main street alike. Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google…we even came up with an acronym for them, “FAANG”.

But something happened over the last year or two: Many of these companies started to stumble. Facebook’s user-base declined for the first time ever, sending their CEO on a Quixotic mission to find “the next big thing”. Netflix is finding itself struggling in a rapidly competitive space. And Google continues its mission to eventually convert every service it has into a canceled messaging app.

And then there’s Twitter.

Up until this year, Twitter just sort of…existed. It was ubiquitously uninteresting, somehow simultaneously both important and irrelevant. Then Elon Musk took it over and disrupted it in about the worst (or best, depending on your perspective) way possible. Throughout all of these developments, it’s felt very hard to see where the trajectory of tech is going. What does the next ten years look like, if all of these infallible institutions are failing?

Right about now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “All of this tracks, but what does it have to do with TILvids?” Which is a fair question, and one I’ve had to ponder myself lately. You see, originally I started TILvids, this PeerTube instance, as a reaction to being disillusioned with YouTube. I had been making content since 2007 for the platform, and while it once seemed so exciting to make niche content that could get tens of thousands of views just because other people cared about it, that feeling had largely disappeared by the time I stopped actively creating for the platform in 2017. I was tired of having to alter my content just to chase a constantly-shifting algorithm in order to get views. I just wanted to make the videos I wanted to make, find the people who used to enjoy that content, and share it with them. It really felt like I lost my friends, and they had been replaced by an uncaring AI that was optimized for something I actively despised.

So I started TILvids, as a way to go in a different direction. I love making and watching edutainment content, and that’s why I made that the focus of our instance. But along the way, it’s become more than that. I didn’t have any notion of decentralization when I started TILvids, I just wanted to build a place that reflected what I loved. But as I’ve watched what is happening to the tech industry over the last year, it finally feels like I can sense where things are headed.

We’re going to make the Internet weird again.

I grew up alongside the rise of the Internet. I remember web rings being the only way to discover content you were interested in. I remember downloading RealPlayer video files from random websites to watch South Park. I remember hopping on various IRC channels to talk to people. I remember the rise of Napster and feeling like “we the people” were collectively building something truly new.

And then everything started to change. Ads became a thing. The “weirdness” of the Internet was sanitized and scrubbed away. Google and Facebook, two scrappy startups, became so big and data-hungry that they knew everything about everyone, billions of us. It feels like it happened overnight, but really it took 15+ years of steady encroachment. And I don’t want to completely disregard what they’ve done, because both companies have innovated, made some good products that people enjoy using, and the centralized nature of the companies certainly made it approachable. But the trade-offs were very large indeed, including all aspects of data privacy and control.

But it feels like the tide is beginning to shift in a new direction. I’ve felt this before. I remember downloading MP3s and recording them out to a tape-deck so I could play my own mix-tapes in my car in the late-90s. I remember buying a Windows Mobile phone in the early 2000s just so that I could load old SNES ROMs onto it to play games. I remember when I canceled cable in 2007 because I was so certain that the future was streaming videos. All of those times, I could so confidently feel the direction of where technology was going, even when your average person on the street was barely aware of these ideas.

And I feel that now too, with decentralization. All of us, on Mastodon, PeerTube, Pixelfed, Matrix, and other decentralized services can feel it. And even if the larger world has no idea what we’re talking about right now, it doesn’t matter, because the we’re already on the inevitable path forward. The future of decentralized services is very bright, and I’m honored to be playing a role in pushing it forward. As we head into 2023, this is what I’m going to constantly run on loop in my head.

As for TILvids, my plans for the community remain largely unchanged. The next year will look like:

Continue trying to recruit content creators to share with the community.
Work to scale the server(s).
Try to continue bringing in donations in order to keep finances under control.
Investigate and set goals for how to eventually transition the site into a community-run organization.

Thank you so much for all of the continued support. I’ve said before what a lonely experience the first year of running the site was. Every week, more and more people are reaching out, watching videos and leaving comments, and talking with me and providing ideas and feedback via Mastodon. The fact that people care enough to engage means a lot, and as long as that holds true, I’m going to keep pushing forward.

Happy New Year to us all!

TILvids Update - November 2022

2022-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hello! It’s been a while since we’ve had a TILvids blog update. The reason for this is two-fold: first, trying to keep a log of everything that has happened and then find time to do a write-up is pretty time-consuming, and second, not every month brings big updates, so it’s often hard to come up with something to say. However, the last few months have been quite eventful, so I thought it time to do another update. Here’s what’s been going on (including a note about federation at the end)!

Hosting Update

First some very good news. After months of trying to get it to work, I was finally able to stand up a redundant mirror instance of TILvids, based in the US. When we switched out hosting providers before, we shifted from Canada to Germany for the hosting. While this ended up being great for EU-based viewers, it was a degraded streaming experience for users in NA. While hosting the main site in Germany still means it loads a bit slower for NA users, at least the HD streaming should be much smoother (which has so far been the experience I’ve heard).

The rules I set in place for redundancy seem to be working, and as of this time the vast majority of the content on the site is being successfully mirrored (see the image above). I continue to look at ways to improve our experience, so if you have ideas, feel free to let me know on Mastodon.

Mastodon

Speaking of Mastodon, the last few weeks of Elon Musk’s general mishandling of Twitter have been quite beneficial to the Mastodon community. Since we’ve had a TILvids presence for quite some time on Mastodon, that meant a big influx of users for us as well! It’s so nice to be able to use this open/decentralized medium as a huge way of getting the word out about TILvids. I’ve had so many wonderful conversations sprout from the Mastodon community, and look forward to even further conversations in the future. Please feel free to follow our Mastodon account and join in!

New Creators

Every month brings new creators, but the last few months have been even more special than usual! We’ve had some really great new creators come on board, including:

I used to be able to list every new creator in these blog posts, but there’s just too many coming online to do that now. I do try to call them out on Mastodon though, so make sure to follow our account if you want the latest updates!

Patrons

Once again, as a result of more attention on Mastodon, we’ve also seen an uptick in patrons at TILvids in the last month. This is incredibly important as we grow, because costs are going up across the board. We were recently hit with an inflation increase by our host, we’re having to expand storage space, and add redundancy servers for better performance. I’m often asked by new creators “how much storage space can I have”, and the answer completely depends on the donations coming in from the community. The more donations we have, the more space we can give, and the more creators will be willing to contribute their content. It truly is a virtuous circle. Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who contributes their financial support, no matter the amount, to help our community continue to grow! If you’re interested in contributing, you can find our Patreon here

Spam

As TILvids has grown in popularity, so have the reports of spammers posting comments on videos. It’s sometihng I’m aware of, and doing my best to combat it, though the tools in PeerTube are pretty limited. I’ve turned on email verification for new accounts, added a few moderators, and we work on deleting comments/accounts as they come in. It has been suggested that I turn off account creation and manually approve all new accounts, but with over a dozen new requests coming in every day, that’s not something that scales well. I’ll keep thinking about the problem, and there’s a decent discussion going on at the PeerTube GitHub repo with some ideas as well.

Thoughts on Federation

And finally, some thoughts on Federation.

I’m often asked the question, “Why doesn’t TILvids federate with other PeerTube instances?” I thought instead of having to answer this over and over, I’d just write something here to refer people to in the future.

In general, most people start a PeerTube instance for one of two reasons:

They want to be a general instance. They have rules about storage space and possibly some light content guidelines, but otherwise will let anyone join and share content.
They are a content creator and want to host their own content, and federate with the rest of the PeerTube fediverse so their content can be discovered.

These are both completely legitimate reasons for starting a PeerTube instance and I support them. That said, my goal with TILvids was to do something different.

Before I started TILvids, I actually created content pretty regularly; I started uploading videos to YouTube around 2006. Eventually, over time, I watched as the spirit of YouTube shifted, from many small creators sharing interesting niche content, to “influencers” chasing ads and sponsors. This is not what I was interested in, and I felt it ruined the YouTube community (I have similar feelings about the general Internet as well, and very much subscribe to the “original sin” theory of the Internet).

So I began to consider what I might do to change that. Originally, I tried starting a video community called “Smartyflix” (this was around 2017) based around a white-label video hosting service. There were very few hosting solutions at the time, and it became prohibitively expensive to scale. My hope was that I could find enough people to pay for the service to keep it afloat, but that never materialized.

Disappointed but undeterred, I set the idea on the shelf for a while. Then a few years later, I started hearing about new hosting options beginning to come online. I took a look at LBRY but was immediately turned off by the crypto aspect, and found much of the content to be riddled with conspiracy-peddling garbage. I also discovered another ecosystem called PeerTube, and while it didn’t have any of the crypto nonsense of LBRY, it still suffered from pretty low-quality content throughout the ecosystem. But I loved the decentralized spirit and self-hosting, which felt so much like the early years of the Internet.

From this, I saw an opportunity: What if I could leverage the potential of PeerTube, and find a way to limit the garbage content, to build a community of niche edutainment content that was similar to the early years of YouTube? I decided early on that this likely meant NOT becoming a “general” PeerTube instance, which also meant limiting the federation aspect, at least initially, so as to give the community time to define itself. As I talked to video creators and explained my idea, the federation concept was so foreign to them anyway that it only made more sense to simply ignore that aspect of it.

Which takes us roughly to today. I continue to believe that limiting the federation aspect of TILvids is important to how the community will grow. I have talked before about the “hub and spoke” model of TILvids as how I see us eventually embracing federation. As creators come to TILvids and grow, we will encourage them to start their own instances, and then federate with them. This can be viewed as a strong vetting process to who we choose to federate with (similar to choosing who to federate with as a general PeerTube instance). This is important to me as a creator, because I strongly believe it is in the best interest of creators to eventually control their means of hosting their content, while recognizing this is very challenging for early creators, and why something like TILvids is important to them. Over time, we’ll grow a large ecosystem of edutainment content creators.

Hopefully that sheds some light onto the reasons behind this decision. I know that not everyone in the PeerTube ecosystem agrees with this strategy, and that’s perfectly fine. Diversity of ideas is healthy for an open community, and this is just another of them. Time will tell if it will be a beneficial one.

Parting Thoughts

This turned out to be a much longer post that I originally intended, but I suppose that’s what happens when you don’t post an update for a few months. Perhaps I’ll try to put these out roughly quarterly in the future, depending on if people find the information useful/interesting. As always, I want to thank the entire TILvids community for everything. Your support, whether through donations, viewings, content contribution, or just spreading the word, is constantly appreciated by me. Our community is what you make of it, and so far, we’ve been making something great. Let’s keep building! 💙

TILvids Update - June 2022

2022-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

After a couple of exciting months in server-admin-land, happy to have a relatively quiet month in May. Due to the upgrades and expansions made possible, I’ve been able to get back to pulling in content from creators that don’t post themselves, but give us permission to re-post for them on TILvids. Hoping to keep that up a bit, to continue introducing great new content and creators to our community!
Big thanks to new TILvids patrons Separate Realities and Escovan! Donations from our patrons go directly to supporting and expanding our server, which lets us continue to add more creators and content to our community. If you’d like to donate to TILvids, check out our Patreon!
I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of June 1st, 2022, we currently have 111,552 video views, 1,674 users, and 207GB of local videos.

Here are a few thoughts for July:

I mentioned last month that with the migration of the site to a new host, we have seen some slowdowns for users in the western-hemisphere, and I was hoping to construct a pseudo-CDN by spinning up a mirror server in the western-hemisphere. Still no progress there, but would like to look into it when I get some time.
Please keep spreading the word about TILvids, especially to your favorite edutainment content creators! We are fortunate enough now to have a decently-sized community, which begins to start to be attractive to creators. This is such a far cry from where things started out almost two years ago. I can’t say enough how much respect I have for our community, and how exciting it has been to watch it grow and develop! I’ve learned so much from all of this, and count TILvids as one of my joys in life.

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

TILvids Update - May 2022

2022-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

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! ❤️

TILvids Update - April 2022

2022-04-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

So, a funny thing happened on the way to the blog update. I have a calendar reminder set to write up a blog post at the end of the month, but my reminder series went out and I forgot to post last month! I said to myself, “Oh well, it wasn’t a big month, I’ll just squeeze March and April together, since there’s probably not a lot to report…” Famous last words, as it turns out. I noticed toward the last week or so of March that the site was loading really slowly, video thumbnails weren’t showing up on social media, etc. I reached out to the Yunohost community (we use their technology to admin the site) and they said that the 4.1.0 release might have some issues, and that updating to 4.1.1 should hopefully clear it up. I usually lag our instance behind a few weeks after updates, just to let the dust settle a bit, but it was bad enough that I opted to roll the dice. Oops. Upon initializing the update procedure, there were a number of errors that occurred. The system ended up bailing on the install, but it left the server in an inoperable state. I had to spend the next few days talking between the PeerTube and Yunohost communities to even track down what was happening. In the end, I had to manually dig into the PeerTube service and delete a plugin to support Chromecast playback that appeared to be no longer compatible with PeerTube, along with deleting over 150 database records that somehow became duplicated. All in all, it took about three days to get to the bottom of what was happening, but happy to report that the server did recover after that, update 4.1.1 was rolled out, and it appears the original problem I was trying to solve did indeed improve after the update. Lots of lessons learned and things to think about coming out the other side of this, but ultimately, just happy everything is back to a working state again. Thanks for hanging with me while I tried to sort it out!
In more positive news, happy to welcome new TILvids creator LINMOB to our community, who is making some great FOSS hardware content! Also happy to welcome v_brigham who is bringing some neat Commodore 64 and other retro dev topics. We’re excited and thankful to have our new creators sharing with the TILvids community. Welcome aboard!
The question pops up from time-to-time, about what my goals are for TILvids and the community. I’ve touched on that before in previous blog entries, but expounded on it in a few different ways in this Reddit reply so I thought it was worth sharing here as well. Ultimately, I really want TILvids to be a positive force in the tech world that is driven by a sense of community. I drive most of my decisions about the site with that foundation in mind.
I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of April 1st, 2022, we currently have 105,925 video views, 1502 users, and 193GB 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 May:

Better backups. I could have saved myself a lot of heartburn by having a more robust backup strategy. It’s a challenge, since I don’t host TILvids locally and our database of videos isn’t exactly small at this point. I’ve already made a few changes that should help make it better going forward, but I still want to investigate more.
Server migration. While trying to fix the server issue, I had a good chat with some folks on our chat servers, and they tipped me off to some different hosting options that not only have better resources, but also might even reduce costs a bit (which is something that needs to be done to ensure long-term viability of the site). I’m going to investigate that a bit. I don’t want to make any changes just yet, coming off of all the excitement from last month, but it’s on the roadmap, so expect some changes there at some point.

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

TILvids Update - February 2022

2022-02-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

First off, huge thank-you to our newest patrons, Nick T, Cypheon, and 1peter10! TILvids is completely community-funded, so becoming a patron means you are helping the community grow. Community donations go to expanding storage and other server resources, so that we can continue to add creators and share more content with the TILvids community. If you’re interested in becoming a patron, go here to learn more!
We were joined by a number of new creators this month! Simon Caine is bringing the TILvids community his unique blend of humor and tech commentary. Jacob Westall is showing off some neat DIY projects. And Freedcreative has a channel dedicated to all things Krita. We’re excited and thankful to have our new creators sharing with the TILvids community. Welcome aboard!
Congrats to Geotechland(@geotechland@fosstodon.org) on the success of his latest video about Gnome 42, which shot up to well over 1,000 views! A great accomplishment indeed!
I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of February 1st, 2022, we currently have 101,460 video views, 1350 users, and 188GB 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 February:

Still waiting for PeerTube 4.0 to stabilize before updating the server, as there appear to be a few potential upgrade bugs still out there. The youtube-dl plugin is lately having a lot of trouble pulling in videos from creators’ other channels, and 4.0 promises to address some of that.

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

TILvids Update - January 2022

2022-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Welcome to January 2022, TILvids community! Because this is the last post for 2021, and since I’ve had some requests for a video update in the past, I thought I’d take the opportunity to make a “Year in Review” video for the TILvids community. So without further ado, here is the TILvids 2021 Year in Review video!

I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of January 1st, 2022, we currently have 96,702 video views, 1252 users, and 185GB 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 January:

We had a huge influx of users, creators, and even donors after this and a few other Twitter threads. We’re so happy to see new folks discover our TILvids community, and you are all very much welcomed! I’ll be introducing our new creators via our TILvids video of the day in the coming week!
Looking forward to the 4.0 PeerTube update, which I’ll hopefully be able to roll out this month. The youtube-dl plugin is lately having a lot of trouble pulling in videos from creators’ other channels, and 4.0 promises to address some of that.

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

TILvids Update - December 2021

2021-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

First off, Happy Thanksgiving to the TILvids community! Even if you aren’t visiting from the United States, I hope you are able to stop every once in a while and think about the people and things in your life that bring you joy!
Getting down to business, we were joined by an awesome new creator this month, Video Game Animation Study! Hosted by Dan Root, he is sharing some great break-downs of how animation is used in video games, especially retro-style games.
Speaking of Dan Root, not only is he contributing his content, but he’s also donating to our Patreon! We also are able to say thanks to Kuba, who joined us as a patron this month as well! Thank you all so much for your contributions. TILvids is a completely community-funded project, and the more donations we have, the more we can afford additional storage space for creators, processing to transcode video files, etc. If you are in a position to help and want to support TILvids, consider donating!
And finally, I updated the PeerTube software from 3.4.0 to version 3.4.1. No new features in this version, but some welcome bug fixes. For creators sharing on our community, the youtube-dl has been having some trouble lately, and is sometimes failing to pull in content. In looking at what’s coming in PeerTube’s 4.0.0 update, it looks like they’re moving from youtube-dl to yt-dlp, a more regularly maintained script, so hopefully that will help smooth things out. 🤞
I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of November 1st, 2021, we currently have 94,630 video views, 1184 users, and 182GB 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 December:

Probably a bit slower this month from the admin side, as we have the holidays coming up, and things tend to get hectic in personal lives at that time. I still intend to post a TILvids video of the day though, and will hopefully find some holiday-themed content to brighten up everyone’s lives!

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

TILvids Update - November 2021

2021-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

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

Happy Halloween! For those of you checking our Reddit, Mastodon, or Twitter feeds, I post a TILvids video of the day on most days. To celebrate the Halloween spirit, I tried to highlight a number of “spooky” themed videos last month. Hopefully you enjoyed the festivities! 🎃
We were joined by an awesome new creator this month, The 1920s Channel! They are going to be contributing some excellent content all about 1920s style, art, culture, and more. Welcome aboard, and thanks for sharing your videos with the TILvids community!
We have two new patrons donating to support the TILvids community, Barry Solow and PublicLewdness! Also, a few regular patrons increased their monthly donation. Thank you all so much for your contributions. TILvids is a completely community-funded project, and the more donations we have, the more we can afford additional storage space for creators, processing to transcode video files, etc. If you are in a position to help and want to support TILvids, consider donating!
And finally, I updated the PeerTube software from 3.3.0 to version 3.4.0. There are some interesting new features in this update, especially relating to subscribing to individual creators on other instances, which is something the TILvids community has asked for. If you know of a creator on another instance that you would like to see as part of the TILvids stream, let us know on the Matrix or Discord chat!
I had a request to track some of the site stats. As of November 1st, 2021, we currently have 91,825 video views, 1075 users, and 179GB 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 November:

We’re now starting to have a number of regular content contributors to the site. You all rock! Fresh content is what keeps TILvids interesting, and it’s great to see all of your different videos! Please continue spreading the word to other creators and encourage them to consider sharing their edutainment content on TILvids. If you know someone who is interested in sharing, have them reach out on Mastodon, Twitter, Matrix, Discord, Reddit, Lemmy…lots of great options!

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