See comment below this one. They’re starting to poke at this, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see more options like that going forward.

Yup! I was happy to see this feature get released, as it definitely would provide another avenue to the hub and spoke model (i.e. creators don’t necessarily need their own instance to federate back with TILvids, just be on an instance).

Federation is a question that comes up frequently. It’s an issue that I’ve punted on because there were creators that were uncomfortable with their content “just showing up elsewhere”. It’s already a hard sell just to get them to let us share the content to begin with, so it’s not a hill I was willing to die on. My hope is that we can actually see creators on TILvids grow over time, start their own instances, and then all federate with each other in a ring. I explained more of that in one of our recent blog posts.

This is something I’ve constantly struggled with. I frequently get “THIS GUY IS JUST RIPPING OFF YOUTUBERS!” when I have painfully gone through and vetted almost every single creator that is either posting their content to TILvids or that we re-post (with their permission). It sort of underscores the main problem I have with PeerTube right now, that it’s just the wild-west of content, and I’m really trying to legitimize it a bit.

I wish I had a better solution. I think it’s something that will just take time.

I love watching these old videos trying to divine the future. It’s always amazing how much they get right…and equally how much they completely miss on. :)

That’s certainly possible. It’s something we’re all learning (and inventing) on the fly. Thank you very much for your support, it’s appreciated!

Interesting, I will pass that feedback along to our creators! Make sure to follow along on Mastodon as well, especially if you have additional feedback! https://mstdn.social/@tilvids

Well, I’m actually the admin of the entire tilvids.com website, so I’m trying to advocate for dozens of creators! So it’s actually even trickier than just trying to make good content, I have to find LOTS of good content and creators that fit the edutainment focus of tilvids.com! :)

Make sure to check out some of the other videos on the website! https://tilvids.com/videos/recently-added

My biggest question is how do we keep people coming back to the site? Right now, I post a TILvids video of the day to Twitter, Mastodon, and Reddit (and @the_tech_beast@lemmy.ml graciously reposts on Lemmy as well) but I’d love to know how to keep people coming back to TILvids daily, like they would YouTube, Netflix, etc.

Same, they look fantastic and have good reviews. But yeah, they aren’t cheap. :)

One of those things you don’t think about…until you do! :)

Thank you so much for making people aware of TILvids, and encouraging community support! As you stated, we are non-profit and completely run on both content AND donations from the community. As we add more content creators, the monthly cost for storage and server resources increases. Donations from the community help to offset those costs and keep things running. Every little bit counts, and even small monthly donations add up to big help. If you enjoy TILvids and are in a position to help support financially, it is greatly appreciated!

Great idea! I don’t have the capacity at the moment, which is why I post it to Reddit (and @the_tech_beast@lemmy.ml graciously copies it over to here). Someday I’d love to do that though!

A fix is in the works! You can actually download a build right now that has the fix, or wait until the next release. There will still be an issue with seeking in the video (which doesn’t work), but you should be able to at least stream videos again!

They were pretty useful little gadgets!

Thanks for the tip! I will look into it, or feel free to reach out to them and ask them to get in touch (often folks from the community is much more powerful than me asking directly, as this shows their fans want them somewhere other than YouTube).

Absolutely! I hope that TILvids can become a great example of how to do a PeerTube instance right, and that many other communities arise around targeted instances of content!

Hey, thanks for taking the time to leave feedback! I certainly appreciate hearing ideas about ways to make the community better.

To be honest, the videos with the most views typically fall into two categories:

1. The creator already has a following and they post TILvids links to their social media profiles. Geotechdigital and Pine64 are good examples of this.

2. The video gets picked up and posted to a Reddit sub that has lots of members.

The channels about digital rights, Linux, open-source, etc. generally do better because their creators care passionately about building alternatives to YouTube, and so they don’t mind promoting their TILvids links. For the channels that aren’t about digital-rights, most of them have simply agreed to let TILvids use their content, but they don’t actively promote their TILvids channel, they promote their YouTube channel.

I do completely agree that we should keep our community narrow, which is why I didn’t set out to create a general YouTube replacement where anyone could upload anything. However, by focusing very narrowly on only tech/digital rights, the audience pool will be very small. I also think there are other instances catering well to that crowd (i.e. PrivacyTools). Is that the right approach? I guess time will tell. TILvids is definitely a living experiment. :)

Thanks again for the feedback, I really appreciate it!

At this time, tilvids.com does not have following enabled, in order to keep our community’s content focused on edutainment. If you’re interested in using us as your main PeerTube instance though, feel free to make an account and share your content!