tilvids

Hey! I just wanted to share a new video community that I've started called TILvids (tilvids.com).

The goal of the site is to create a video community based around edutainment content from smaller, independent creators. I started it because I've become very frustrated with YouTube, both as a creator and a user. As a creator, it's annoying to constantly chase YouTube's algorithm to try and get anyone to see my content. As a user, it feels really bad/unhealthy the way YouTube constantly harvests my data.

I started the community with the idea of it being non-profit. There are no video ads, no harvesting user data, etc. It runs on open-source PeerTube. Creators are welcome to monetize however they want (Patreon donations, merchandise, in-video sponsors, etc), and the site will eventually be donation-based (currently I'm just self-funding it as best as I can).

Creators are pretty heavily curated for the moment, with uploads disabled for normal users, due to limitations on scale/cost, and because I want to get some good creators in the system to help define what type of community I want to grow. Eventually I intend to open this up a bit more to allow initial downloads for all users, and then expanded storage for users that are creating content the community values.

I'd love feedback, both around the idea and how the site works if you're willing to check it out (https://tilvids.com). Happy to answer questions you might have as well. Appreciate all of it in advance!