Here is my guide to the global Internet.
Note: This blog is written in early 2025. Things might change in the future. I only speak Chinese(native), English(near-native), Russian(intermediate), German(intermediate)
Global Websites/Platforms
Social Media
| US | China | Russia | EU | Japan/Korea | Open-Source & Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Video | YouTube, Twitch | Bilibili， 抖音, Tiktok(blocked in China)， 微信视频号 | Vk Video, Rutube | Stream.cz(Czech) | Niconico, SOOP, Naver TV | Likee(Singapore)， PeerTube(Open-source), Aparat(Iran) |
| Chat | Whatsapp, Discord, Facebook Messenger, Signal | 微信, QQ | Telegram(in Dubai now), Vk Messenger, Max | Viber(Cyprus) | Line, KakaoTalk | Matrix(Open-source) |
| Micro-Blogging | X, Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr | 微博,小红书 | Vk, Ok | / | Mixi, BAND | Mastodon(Open-source), Eitaa (Iran) |
| Forums/Q&A | Reddit, Quora, Hacker News | 知乎,贴吧 | Pikabu, Ответы Mail | Gutefrage(Germany), Jeuxvideo(France) | Chiebukuro, 2channel, DCinside | Lemmy(Open-source) |
| Blogging | Medium, Substack | 微信公众号, 知乎专栏,CSDN | Dzen, Habr | / | Note.com, Naver Blog, Daum Cafe | Ghost(Open-source), Wordpress(Open-source) |
Entertainment
| US | China | Russia | EU | Japan/Korea | Open-Source & Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Movies | Netflix, IMDb, Rotten Tomatoes | IQIYI, 豆瓣电影 | IVI, Kinopoisk | AlloCine(France) | Watcha, Naver Movie | / |
| Books | Goodreads | 豆瓣读书 | Livelib, Яндекс книгу | LovelyBooks(Germany) | Bookmeter, Aladin | / |
| Sports | ESPN, NBC | CCTV5 | Match TV | Kicker(Germany), Sport.cz (Czech) | NHK Sports, Naver Sports, Daum Sports | Varzesh3(Iran) |
Utility
| US | China | Russia | EU | Japan/Korea | Open-Source & Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Gmail, Outlook, iCloud | 163 | Yandex Mail, Mail.ru | GMX(Germany), Proton(Switzerland), Seznam Mail(Czech) | Yahoo Mail, Naver Mail | / | |
| Shopping | Amazon, eBay | 京东,淘宝,拼多多 | Ozon, Wildberries | Zalando(Germany) | Rakuten, Coupang | / |
| Money | Paypal, Google Pay | 微信,支付宝 | SberPay | / | Line Pay, Naver Pay, Kakao Pay | / |
| Mobile Provider | AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile | 中国移动, 中国联通, 中国电信 | МТС, МегаФон, Билайн | Deutsche Telekom(Germany), Orange(France) | NTT Docomo, SoftBank, KDDI, SK Telecom, KT, LG U+ | MTN Irancell(Iran) |
| Jobs | BOSS 直聘 | HeadHunter | Xing(Germany), Volnamista(Czech) | Rikunabi, Saramin | / | |
| Mobile | Google Play, Apple Appstore | 华为应用市场 | Rustore | / | / | F-Droid(Open-source), Cafe Bazaar(Iran) |
| Translation | Google Translate | 百度翻译 | Yandex Translate | DeepL(Germany), Seznam Slovník(Czech) | Naver Papago | / |
Hard Tech
| US | China | Russia | EU | Japan/Korea | Open-Source & Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Search | Google, Bing | 百度,搜狗 | Yandex | Seznam(Czech) | Yahoo, Naver | / |
| Cloud | AWS, Azure, GCP, Cloudflare | 阿里云,腾讯云,华为云 | Yandex Cloud, Selectel, Timeweb, DDOS Guard | Ionos(Germany), Hetzner(Germany), Upcloud(Finland), OVH(France) | NTT, Fujitsu, Naver, Kakao, Samsung | / |
| LLM | Google Gemini, Grok, Claude, HuggingFace | DeepSeek, Qwen | Gigachat, Yandex Alice | Mistral AI(France) | / | / |
Resources
| US | China | Russia | EU | Japan/Korea | Open-Source & Other | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Git | Github | Gitee | Gitflic | / | / | Gitlab(Open-source) |
| Maps | Google Maps, Apple Maps | 高德地图, 百度地图 | Yandex Maps, 2gis | Here Maps(Germany), Mapy.cz(Czech), Mappy(France) | Yahoo! Japan Maps, Naver Map | OpenStreetMap(Open-source) |
| Wiki | Wikipedia | 百度百科 | Ruwiki | / | Namu(Korea) | EcuRed (Cuba) |
| Archive | Internet Archive | / | / | archive.today(Czech) | / | / |
Internet Archive
Many websites can be archived, for example, Wikipedia pages(since everything changes), Reddit communities before they go down or get banned, or YouTube channels before they delete their videos. Internet Archive also contains OpenStreetMap data. It also saves YouTube videos by decoding the video url to something like googlevideo.com and archiving it. Internet Archive took down controversial far-right websites. If you use Internet Archive to save a large file on the Internet it will save around 200 MB, and if the webpage contains too much content it won't be able to save everything in external links.
Internet Archive can be used in a S3 bucket-like way. Internet Archive doesn't allow uploading encrypted zip files (you can zip the encrypted file again to upload but that's not a good idea). There is no limit for uploading.
Internet's Dark Places
For a website to thrive (even a bad one), there needs to be large amounts of people for an active community. Google does block some, but Yandex doesn't. Websites with copyrighted movies, torrents, gore contents or political extremism are literally one search away on Google or Yandex. These websites need DDOS protection and Cloudflare might be unwilling to offer service to them. You can look up the domain's DNS server on WHOIS, some examples are DDoS-Guard(breachforums) or DNSPod(kiwifarms).
The thing needs to be really, really bad and taboo(drugs, exploitation) for it to be only available in the dark web. This is very dangerous and pointless for me.
How to Control Your Data?
The Easy (Good) Solution
Don't care about your data. When there are too many files on Google Drive, empty it without backing up. Or even better, forget where you stored files.
The Complicated (Horrible) Solution
- Github: https://github.com/settings/admin
- Mail:
offlineimap - Data in Google(YouTube subscriptions, Gmail, Chrome, Google Drive): https://takeout.google.com/
- WeChat: https://github.com/LC044/WeChatMsg (Needs to run on Windows, first move the chat history there) Note that WeChat doesn't even store your chat on the Cloud (however, it's proprietary, and chats are valuable training data, so who knows?)
- Telegram: https://telegram.org/blog/export-and-more, Download the desktop client to export all data
- Mastodon: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/moving/#export
- Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/settings/data-request
- Umap: https://umap.openstreetmap.fr/en/me
- Strava: https://www.strava.com/athlete/delete_your_account (This isn't deleting your account. The button for personal data is there somehow)
- Alipay Payments: https://consumeprod.alipay.com/record/standard.htm then
iconv -f GB2312 -t UTF-8 output.csv > alipay_record_utf8.csv - Linode invoice: https://cloud.linode.com/account/billing
- WeChat Pay: On the mobile app Service Notification -> All transactions -> FAQ
- Openai: https://platform.openai.com/settings/organization/billing/history, but no buttons, you can ctrl+p
- Citi Bank: Click on Accounts -> Transactions -> Show All Transactions
Userscript and Extensions
I use extensions such as Ublock Origin, but for general stuff I like Userscripts more because it's cross-browser. Userscripts is basically automatically running code in the debugging console. Userscripts cannot create new things (theoretically yes, if you write a million lines of code, but practically)
- Customizing up the UI and removing annoyances, layout changes, dark mode
- Adding keyboard shortcuts
- Redirect and block websites
- Auto-clicking, auto-filling
- Interacting with the page source code or external sources(on YouTube fetch different subtitles from network requests, on IMDB add a link near a movie to search on a torrent site, on YouTube add a button to get a summary of the video by making a request to a cloud provider)