As soon as I saw this news, I signed up there in order to see how it is like. I’m yet to find non-Chinese-language content, as I don’t really know Chinese. I mean, I do know from memory some very specific Chinese ideographs (given my special interests) such as maotouying (猫头鹰 lit. “Cat-headed eagle”, which is one of the words for “owl”, aside from xiao 鴞) which was, unsurprisingly, my first search in Bilibili. (I also know words and ideographs such as hong 红 red, ni hao 你好 greetings, ren 人 person/people, among others that wouldn’t suffice for me to, say, buy 500g of bread in a bakery during some trip to China, lol)

The platform quite of reminds me of xiaohongshu (Red note), including the same emoji pack.

Then I tried to search for words with Latin alphabet (e.g. “Ereshkigal” and “Pomba-gira”) and the results were nothing directly related to my search query, with Bilibili returning me a list of recommended videos based on my watch history (owl videos) instead.

One thing I liked is the lack of notifications (TikTok used to push notifications a lot) and the (momentary) lack of advertisements, maybe because there aren’t companies from my geographic region (Brazil) buying ad placement there yet.

As a Brazilian, I’m sincerely wishing to see more Chinese and nonwestern alternatives to things, including but not limited to video platforms. I’ve been boycotting YouTube for two years and counting, for example, and it would be interesting to see a Chinese alternative to it other than the westernized TikTok (which is nowhere near to Chinese-only Douyin and its likely better/educational content). And, of course, I’m also rooting for PeerTube to gain traction, because it’s native to Fediverse.

!technology@lemmy.world