Time flies. Everyone agrees with it. It's so fast that it's already my first anniversary on this blockchain based social media platform. Let's look at how I even came here in the first place, and what I did to contribute to this blockchain.

Where I came from

Originally a YouTube content creator with 337 subscribers (as of 20th February 2018).

Remember that day? Or remember this deadly email from YouTube on the right? That was the date when YouTube did their mass demonetization on channels who do not meet their updated thresholds of 4,000 hours of watch time per year and 1,000 subscribers. This huge news created a lot of frustration within the communities on YouTube.

Let me pull this exact figure here. I have been posting videos on YouTube for 2 years, and made 180 videos over there, which generated over 100,000 views combined.

I was paid a grand total of $97.71 USD to my PayPal account after my MCN SocialBlade took their 30% cut (plus about $30 USD generous donations by my viewers after PayPal fees).

On Steemit/DTube, even considering the low Steem price right now, my total earnings was about $400 USD from your upvotes as well as curation rewards generated. And so far, I have only posted 55 videos on DTube.

That's a huge difference!

Signing up for a Steem account

On the exact day where YouTube videos got demonetized, one of my clients (@llvllan) found Steemit and DTube and told me to check it out (while I was looking for real alternatives to YouTube). So I applied for a Steem account from Steemit Inc, which took exactly 10 days for my application to be approved.

My first post on Steem!

https://steemit.com/steemit/@techcoderx/steemit-first-impressions-i-think-this-will-be-huge

Yep, that's my Steem first impressions. As said in the title, looks like we're on the right track towards mass adoption considering Steem DApps dominate the rankings in StateOfTheDApps.

I will be highlighting my first DTube exclusive video when I turn 12 months on DTube. (Currently I'm on the 11th month on DTube)

OneLoveDTube.

Came from @dnews' resteem of a post made by @reseller, I joined @onelovedtube on 26th of March 2018.

This was another right decision as this is where I actually gain subscribers on DTube. They took my reputation from 27s into the 40s before I got curated by DTube for the first time (more on that in a video coming soon when I turn 12 months on DTube).

Utopian-io

I made my first contribution on @utopian-io on the video-tutorials category (which is my only contribution to this category), which is also a DTube video. It took me over 2 days to put this tutorial together, but sadly the mods did not like it. However I have DTube's support so I wasn't very disappointed.

Check it out here: https://steemit.com/utopian-io/@techcoderx/9j9hcvox

Since then, I have been making development logs regarding IPFS bots and DTube alternative uploaders and we got fair amount of support for these posts.

IPFS bots

After I have identified the ways to keep a video playable forever by hosting IPFS nodes, I have written IPFS Discord bots to automate the process of pinning videos uploaded to video.dtube.top gateway to IPFS node just with a bot command followed by a DTube post link.

Check it out here: https://steemit.com/ipfs/@techcoderx/pflh7zhm

Looks like @vaultec made a better IPFS pinning bot than what I did, so that's why I haven't been working on this lately.

3rd party DTube IPFS uploaders

To achieve decentralization on DTube, it is important to have multiple upload servers so that nobody relies on a single upload server. However the process of uploading videos to DTube manually by adding videos to IPFS node through command line is not a user friendly solution. Due to many things that did not meet my needs on the official uploader code, I have decided to write one from scratch with NodeJS, that is something easy to compile by an average user and comes with a usable web UI.

Check out our LIVE website: https://uploader.oneloved.tube

So many things achieved within my first year on Steem. 62 rep, 1000 SP, promotion to administrator role in #onelovedtube, and many more. Definitely made the right choice to move away from YouTube completely and focus on Steemit and DTube. I will be cross posting videos to LBRY from my next video onwards so let's see how it goes 😉