The first video of Bilibili (av1):Lvba, Lvba, Harmonize Your Whole Family!
THE FILIFILI PROJECT
The Filifili Project aims at providing a video-sharing website, which is similiar to Bilibili but without the agressive CCP-style cencorship, for milions of Chinese-speaking online viewers (or video content consumers). Filifili (or alternatively Feleefelee) resembles Japanese-style pronouncation of "free".
Bilibili (https://www.bilibili.com/) is now one of the leading video sharing/streaming websites in China and the world (website ranking: 3rd in China, 35th in the world, https://www.similarweb.com/top-websites). It is extremly popular amongst young Chinese net users, especially featuring anime, manga and game-related contents.
Bilibili was founded at 2009, initially labelled as "Back garden of AcFun" by it's creator Yi Xu. AcFun is another anime, manga and game-themed video-sharing website, which was founded in 2006, but has subsequently surpassed by the huge success of Bilibili.
The first ever video uploaded to Bilibili is called "Lvba, Lvba, Harmonize Your Whole Family!", by user "➈bishi" (who is actually Yi Xu), the theme of that video is teasing a censoring software called Lvba which was promoted by the Chinese authorities back then. So the origin of Bilibili tells us it was built on a free and rebellious spirit against censorship, and such spirit was very strong among users of Bilibili during it's early years.
However, Bilibili has sadly abandoned it's rebellious spirit in recent years, along with the process of deep commercialisation and politicisation. Nowadays, Bilibili has been heavily infiltrated by many accounts associated to party-controlled media, with many of videos they made (for most of cases promoting official view of the Chinese government, or even conspiracies reinforcing nationalistic tendency) always suspiciously appear in the trending page (and they would appear again even if users have chosen "not interested"!).
At the same time, many videos are suffering heavy censorship or deleted altogether (that normally means it's banned). To add more pain to user experience, many comments (normal or bullet) are deleted without giving any reason, or with very vague reasons. Sometimes users can be banned without warning for mysterious reasons. Furthermore, sometimes during a certain period (for most of cases when there are important events being held in China), comments are completely banned for users with foreign IP addresses (normally disguised as "system maintanance"), which is a severe right violation for these users.
One of the ironical facts is, the first ever video (which was numbered as av1, you can play it at the top of this page), has been deleted, and continued to be deleted when users tried to reupload it. This is a symbolic fact that elucidates Bilibili has gone to the opposite side of it's founding spirit, become a betrayer to itself. On the other hand, there is another fact, although to a lesser extent, can lead to the same conclusion: Bilibili has now largely abandoned it's ACG roots, and increasingly transforming to a website like Youtube which includes almost everything!
For all of these above reasons, we think the only way of resucitating the founding spirit of Bilibili, is to found another website at a oversea location so that the new website could escape the extremly strict censorship of mainland China, and focus our contents on anime, game and manga again.