Comment
This site has completely cut ties with the mainland
The swampy public opinion environment has become so vile that it is not worth investing any time or effort
After migrating, the blogger disconnected his site from mainland China due to dissatisfaction with the Great Firewall's environment and frequent social media account bans. Initially, to improve access for mainland visitors, he filed for ICP and moved the site to Hong Kong. However, recent events and negative discourse led to canceling the filing and migrating to overseas hosts for better reliability.
- #China
- #Great Firewall
32
After several days of migration, this site and its related dependencies are now completely disconnected from mainland China!
When I launched my Gatsby-based blog last year, I completed the ICP filing. This was mainly to improve the stability and speed of access from mainland China and to add CDN for image resources, as the majority of visitors were from the mainland.
However, after obtaining the ICP filing, I moved the site to a Hong Kong host because I often needed to clone code from GitHub, install npm packages, and pull Docker images. Being in Hong Kong, the direct connection speed was also good.
I have always surfed the internet semi-anonymously, and it wouldn't be hard to find my real information if one tried. So from the beginning, I didn't plan to post overly sensitive content here. The ICP filing was acceptable to me at the time. Posting content that might get deleted within the Great Firewall, but is not dangerous, was enough for me.
However, some recent events have made me decide to give up on mainland visitors who can only access my site through a direct connection.
The first reason is the harshness of the public opinion environment within the Great Firewall. The same post that would get friendly and normal comments on the blog would be filled with sarcasm and attacks on social media platforms in mainland China. This is not to say that the atmosphere outside the Firewall is ideal, but if we must compare, the discussion environment within the Great Firewall is extremely poor. I simply do not want to see the negativity bred in such a harsh environment.
The second reason is that my social media accounts within the Great Firewall frequently get banned. Probably because of my subtle expressions wishing for the fall of the Communist Party, I have lost two accounts on Xiaohongshu. My Zhihu account, which I used to read for fun, was also banned due to intensive sarcasm. I am tired of wallowing in the mire.
Initially, the Firewood site was deployed on a Tencent Cloud Tokyo host, using DNSpod for DNS resolution. But before it was officially launched, Tencent notified me of violating content and suspended the DNS resolution, prompting me to migrate resources to Cloudflare in a timely manner.
These events led me to decide to give up on mainland visitors via direct connection, not wanting to be cautious for low-quality traffic.
So I canceled the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and Public Security filing, and migrated services like comments, website analytics, and notifications to overseas hosts, with the main site accelerated by Cloudflare. Offshore access should be very fast, but direct connection from within the Great Firewall might be unstable.
But as I said before, I am too disappointed with the environment within the Great Firewall and don't want to wallow in the mire anymore.