Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”
dexerto.com
Discord isn’t exactly known for generous file-sharing limits, still, the messaging app offered a 25MB limit to free users. The company has now updated its support page to reflect the upload limit for free users has been lowered to 10MB.
I mean, its great that they offer that, but all my files dont need to be permemnant. I would love the ability to review and delete old files
Yeah, makes no sense that they store some pdf I was dragging over to someone one time. Super inefficient. They should allocate an amount of storage per user that then rolls and deletes the oldest files when the cap gets exceeded to make room for the new files.
It's probably because it's their property now and personal data is precious
Maybe, but then they'd want more data, not complaining about needing to limit it. Or maybe it's just because they want lots of small files like text, and not waste it on inefficient sound and video files.
They want more data and literally can't store it efficiently enough. You can read their eula and see, they instantly own anything you upload and you no longer have rights to it, which is absolutely bonkers and pretty dubious in many countries if this is even legal. We found out when they overviewed the security of our studio and we use other communication software now because of it. They could literally argue that they own the assets to the games we make if we send concepts to each other.
Hmm, I wonder if they would get in trouble if someone uploaded child porn to their servers.
I primarily use Discord as a one stop shop to play and run dnd campaigns. I first hopped on it around 2017, and its was way better than any other group chat app. Around the pandemic all my groups started playing on it and it became relatively seamless. I joined exactly one streamers discord but that is totally it. In general I wouldn't expect it to be a good archive, or forum, nor do I expect it to be secure. I use armchord on PC. I started using it before it was enshittified. For what it does, it does it pretty well.
For the record, I have used matrix and Signal. I think both have the issue that a critical mass of my friends don't use them. I liked Signal a lot when it had SMS support. I used it as a my primary SMS app, and some of my friends had signal as well, so that was cool. now its more like a specialized messenger app, and I fucking hate having yet another one of those on my phone. Matrix encryption keys are giant stumbling blocks to my friends who do give a fuck. I play ttrpgs with some people who could not give a fuck. I would have to set up the server, set up the account, and then I would have have to do the encryption key for them. And like people say, Matrix logs you out every little while. You can turn notifications off and totally forget about it. For my non techy friends, this is literally a bridge too far.
I literally have two friends who think Matrix is cool. No one else even has an account, much less a server. And the support to meet people who have this app is very limited. Cool, but I think it will always be a niche.
It took me a lot of convincing to get my friends on Signal instead of WhatsApp. I believe WhatsApp was talking about adding advertising or charging money, and I used that to get people to switch.
This reminds me of the argument I see from Linux users that Linux is just as easy to set up as Windows. I think it doesn't occur to people making that argument that most people never even set up Windows. It's just on their computer when they get it.
The setup needs to be fast and easy for people to consider it. Nobody will spend even 5 minutes figuring something out these days.
Edit to add that a bunch of younger people have never had a computer or laptop. They do their computer stuff on a phone or possibly a tablet and they definitely never did anything technical like reinstall the OS.
How do you understand this without falling into the defeatist mindset that the sheeple deserve to be imprisoned in the state of enshitification that their ignorance, laziness, and unwillingness to learn has helped build? Put down your iPhone, or go check into your local FEMA camp. I hate to be negative like this, but people really seem to be willing to give up everything for convenience and bling.
People can choose what to spend their time doing. Some of us choose to be able to install operating systems, other choose to become master gardeners. Who's to say which one is right or wrong? The gardeners probably don't have any issues using WhatsApp, even if there is advertising in it, because it solves the problem they have. Then they go back to the thing they're experts at instead, saying things like "why can't these tech sheeple grow a radish? send them all to jail."
You dont have to be an expert, i barely know anything about the kinux cli but i still use linux daily
Most people have never installed an operating system, and I've never seen a laptop running Linux for sale at Best Buy or wherever, so there's a huge barrier for entry for the average person.
I'm sure most people would be fine with Linux day to day if it was set up for them, but they're not going to download an ISO, boot from it, and install an OS if they don't have to.
These same people, to stick with my example, might grow delicious tomatoes, better than those you buy at the supermarket. Can anyone grow some tomatoes? Pretty much. Does anyone really have to? No.
the enshitification will go faster now i bet
They want your data, everything you upload to discord belongs to that corporation. Corporations do not have souls
It was a matter of time honestly
You mean auto deleting?
As long as cattle keeps using these white products, there will always be a merchant to sell their data.
We clearly have poorly educated population that can't be bothered with anything besides blind consumption of whatever is trendy.
Plastic clothes, goyslop and data harvesting apps is essentially the condition of the modern wage slave and they appear to be satisfied.
You gotta be fucking kidding me with this antisemitic shit.
I've never heard this word in my life and I somehow knew it was antisemitic?
just googled it
it's apparently a conspiracy that jews feed non-jews (goys) something called goyslop that makes them submissive / slaves
absolutely bonkers
no
slop is just low quality garbage. It's 4chan complaining that modern media is bad. And to add in a sprinkle of their beloved antisemitism, it's bad on purpose because it's intended for goys (non-jews)
The "goy" is the giveaway. I had to google it to be sure, but seriously, what the fuck?
I recommend reporting the comment
Definitely not the kind of shit that should be welcome in this community
Also (after looking it up) I'm pretty sure that "goy" is a term used by jewish people to refer to non-jewish people. So in this case I think they're saying that it is "non-jewish trash" by referring to it as "goyslop".
I could be wrong though, they're pretty incoherent and it's definitely not the kind of comment reply I wanted to see when I woke up from my nap.
Yeah, already reported it.
And yeah, "goyim" is anyone non-Jewish, so the implication is Jews control the world and they only give out the barest minimum of sustenance to goyim known as "goyslop."
Like the amount of time and energy people put into these fucking slurs is ridiculous.
Ah gotcha
On a related tangent, I think my least favorite thing about my instance is that I only see the upvotes for that terrible comment. Which it has entirely too many of.
Honestly the amount of terrible comments and posts like that I see makes me want to switch to an instance with downvotes so that I can see that such shot isn't popular.
If it brings you any solace, Mr Raised-by-4chan is getting absolutely thundercunted with downvotes.
Haven't seen that many in a long while.
This is one of those things where the concept is entirely appropriate and accurate, except for that one teeny tiny minor issue....
It's not the Jews, it's the WASPs and whatever weird Catholic sect/cult that Justice Barret was raised in...okay, and yes, there's probably some Jews in the mix as well.
Because those are the main demographic groups of the .01%
So what's the WASP equivalent for goy? Heathenslop?
Edit: I'm having a hard time imagining left-wing Jews being upset at this observation. I'm guessing at least some of these down votes are done in solidarity for people of Jewish heritage... like myself.
So...thank you and lol.
Nah, they call them "white apps" and so since they are coming from a place of racism against whites, they feel it's totally appropriate and okay to use a term like goyslop. It's a shitty word to use and claiming it's okay because you are actually racist against whites is stupid as fuck. That is still using antisemitic dog whistles. There are other ways to describe the same concept like "fast food slop."
They think other people can't read and don't realize it still makes them a stupid racist.
But the concept isn't just about fast food, it's about the system that produces pink slime based chicken nuggets, and the people who sit up top of that system.
So they've correctly identified systemic problems that hurt people, and that those actions are done with intent, either maliciously or with indifference.
They've just confused capitalism working as intended, as being a Jewish conspiracy.
Also, "white apps" is just really bad racial propaganda. Whoever coined that term needs some new blood in their marketing team.
Regardless of who coined that phrase, I think you're confused about WASP's. It means White Anglo-Saxon Protestant i.e. the largest demographic group within America's version of old money.
High schooler Reading comprehension spotted.
Melt down about one term that you didn't like and ignore the message lol
Either way my content speak for itsel, you could first do some basic diligence before spazzing out and trying to imply intent that ain't there.
We really so deserve the government we got with this genius
Rheee
Sorry bro, you're the one unironically using antisemitic dogwhistles, as if you can't get the same point across without them.
That is your opinion and your entitled to express yourself here but learn to read lol
Somebody needs to get up on their high school education and it's not the person you're talking to.
Pretty funny from someone who could learn to learn to write better and maybe describe things without needing to lean on antisemitic dogwhitles, but I mean, you obviously think you won this argument, so whatever. I'm sure your arguments about why it's really important to use the N-word to explain your points have just about as much substance.
I think I found Trump's Speech Writer's account.
If Trump started saying this shit, he would get re elected
But you don't appear to have sufficient understanding of what I said, if you believe somebody like Trump would repeat this in public lol
Oh. no, I'm not saying that this is something that Trump would say, it just has all the cadence of someone with early onset dementia. It is written like how he speaks, thus "Trump's Speech Writer" and not Trump himself.
the sly antisemitism was totally on brand for Trump as well.
Here we see the Common Incel in his natural habitat, trolling for reactions in his perpetually online state of being. Nature.
Proper Nomanclature is "wage slave"
Thank you :)
A feature that's be nice is giving you a higher upload limit if you make your upload temporary.
Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.
Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.
You don't need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.
Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn't pay for the service.
I hate discord a lot, but this feature kinda destroys the reason discord exists. We used to have irc which is direct communication and needs both systems to be online ( yes, bouncers exist, but they arent perfect ). We moved away from irc so systems didnt need to be online and it was all in the cloud. Direct communication/file sharing from pc would kinda revert all that lol
( lets gooooo, bring irc back :p )
Huh, I wonder how enshitified it has to get before I stop seeing discord on FOSS projects.
It begins lol.
I don't understand why this was even a thing to begin with. FOSS projects using non-FOSS platforms is kinda weird, especially platforms with unclear financial situations like Discord.
Because you don't need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that. We don't need to force FOSS developers to become proficient in everything.
What needs to happen is some kind of tool (ideally FOSS) that lets you spin up an actual forum with the same difficulty to set it up as Discord.
I'm not saying you have to self-host... You could still use something that's open-source and remotely hosted.
Sentry (error logging and bug reporting system) is like this for example. They have a hosted plan, including a generous free plan for open-source projects, but Sentry itself is open-source.
That looks like a really nice policy. But my question then becomes, what happens if the company sells out someday? What if they get bought out by a larger company, or a private equity firm? Did they take funding, and if so, how much leverage do the funders have to influence them to make money and cut out programs like this?
It's great to see companies trying to break that trend and I highly commend them for it! But we have already seen this pattern a million times before and it always ends due to something similar to this.
It is, but then again many (most) are hosted on GitHub.
That they don't collect as much user data is not enshittification. That is when greed kills it. They have been greedy a long time but not being able to hoard as much free user data is a good thing
Could anyone explain the attraction of discord? To me it's UX is atrocious.
Discord got big in online gaming because they offered a VOIP and text chat browser cliemt. Just copy or type the short link and you're in in a minute. They also did free hosting which was huge.
Compared to Teamspeak or Ventrilo, literally just eliminating the steps of downloading a client, installing it, and typing in an IP address caused them to explode overnight. Also you could "host" without changing router settings (most kids/students have to ask their parents or jump through hoops for this).
Technically there was stuff like Skype but that never had the convenient team speak style chat rooms to drop in and out of freely.
Within months of suddenly getting popular, discord had a huge userbase that everybody was using already, and that momentum got us to the point where in some aspects its even replacing the role of wiki's and forums even though its terrible at it.
Also I remember while teamspeak was paid, discord was free.
Eh. There were free licenses. As long as you could show you weren't using it commercially.
Its really convenient if you've got a group of friends spread out across the country for gaming. The voice channels allow people to jump in and out at will. No calling each other. That and bots are really eady to build for it. Sure its all unencrypted but im not putting anything of real value into it.
The NSA agent assigned to monitor me has a character on my Foundry instance.
Back in 2016 I managed to get all of my gaming friends on discord simply by saying "It's like Skype but it doesn't suck"
We simply needed something that worked and let us do voip calls without having to jump through the hoops of setting up ventrilo, mumble or teamspeak. Skype was so aggressively bad that any alternative was like finding a waterpark in the middle of the desert.
My dumbass friends who work in tech thought IRC was too much of a hassle. So we ended up on dickschord
You know that IRC has waaaaay less features, right?
Yeah but we've only used text for years now, so go doodle your features
I don't get it either. They aggressively try to sell nitro, they have ads embedded in their ui. I have no idea why people don't hate it.
they didn't 5 years ago. enshittification at its finest.
We've found it to be the "least bad option" for DnD. Have a Discord window open for everyone to video chat in, have a browser window open with Owlbear Rodeo or Foundry / Forge for your tokens and character sheets, all works smoothly enough. The text chat is sufficient for sending the DM a private message; for group chat to share art of the things you've just run into or organise the next session.
Completely agree that for anything "less transient", then the UX is beyond awful and trying to find anything historical is a massive PITA.
Google Whiteboard could have been better. Hell, I can think of a dozen apps in the Google graveyard that could have been better.
But Discord still exists and they don't, so...
There’s no open source equivalent that does seamless audio and video streaming on every platform.
There is one actually.
https://github.com/revoltchat
It's obviously a WIP. A discord clone essentially
Last time I checked you can't even share your screen
dealbreaker
Matrix works pretty good.
Yeahh no shit! Been using it for a short while now, glad Im able to find a couple groups to chat with, such an underrated service/protocol or whatever. I hope it and element keep getting better maybe I can get more friends to use it! Been tryna ditch Instagram cus half for the reason I use it nowadays is simply to keep in touch with friends and family as I don't use any other messaging service ATM.
Is there a Matrix for dummies guide? It seems difficult to get started with, finding the right client etc.
I also haven't used it in a few years. Chat systems in general don't cooperate with the way my brain works.
It's kinda like lemmy here, but a little more pain because not only do you have to pick your provider, but you also need to be very mindful of how your key pair is managed. Like... don't just uninstall a client without going through the effort of trusting and verifying a new one first, or you may lose the ability to decrypt a lot of history and also break trust with relationships you have.
Security first is a major concern in the system, so it doesn't leave a lot to the imagination unfortunately.
That said, once you convince yourself to set it up, and convince anyone else to do the same, it works pretty nicely. It's like an inner venn diagram of discord, telegram and IRC.
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
I was a member of a number of groups in a larger gaming community most of which migrated from Reddit/Mumble to Discord. It destroyed the quality and accessibility of written content and lore and I wish it had never happened. Then again, we can't go back to reddit at this point either.
Guess I'll be posting my screenshots in 640x480 from now on!
Being part of multiple servers becomes such a painful experience with that interface…even with the “folders” and the search palette.
Beware: old files sonner or later being removed is next. People use Discord like CDN(there are even bunch of clients for that usage) and that is never going to work indefinitely. Honestly, it's very impressive that deletion wasn't their first choice.
Same here, honestly. I would have thought they'd say something like "hey, we're going to delete anything 1 year or older starting next month, and reduce that amount slowly down to 6 months with time" just to give people a general warning in case there was anything they were storing through Discord that they wanted to keep.
There's also just a ton of optimizations they could have done. Are people repeatedly uploading the same file, with the same name and contents? merge them into one CDN link. They'd probably save hundreds of terabytes of data just from reposted memes alone through a hash matching algorithm.
I mean.. couldn't they just move the old files from the hot CDN to cold storage? I bet the few people that go check at old messages care that much about the loading speed of a screenshot. And honestly I think PR wise deleting memories from people makes for worse article titles than smaller files
I suppose they could, but even cold storage has a cost, and with the scale Discord's operating at, they definitely have many terabytes of data that comes into the CDN every day, and that cost adds up if you're storing it permanently.
I also think the vast majority of users would prefer being able to upload much higher resolution images and videos, to being able to see the image they sent with their messages a year ago. I don't often go back through my messages, but I often find myself compressing or lowering the quality of the things I'm uploading on a regular basis.
They could also do the other common sense thing, which is to, on the client side of things, compress images and videos before sending them.
It's a big lie. Why not offer the option to delete automatically after 24h if 15mb extra is so much storage?
Or is it about bandwidth? Why no automatic compression on desktop? Oh wait, that feature existed in the past was scrapped. They think you're fools.
25 MB wasn't even enough to send a single full res screenshot of my desktop.
Its 2024 and we still lack the basic functionality of file sharing between peers without a corp dictator restricting and snooping.
Not that the functionality does not exist (p2p, literally) but if my grandma cant receive the family pictures its not basic.
EDIT: it is possible i am remembering this from when it was 8MB.
Empty desktop is just a few kb but it was not that hard to open enough stuff to exceed 10MB
Til that i have been sending screenshots of only half my screen for not reason
That sounds like a you problem, because a PNG screenshot of my full 5120x1440 desktop is about 850 kB.
Interesting. Mine is 3840x1600 which should be ever so slightly less pixels.
I have noticed the content does matter, is your background native resolution or mostly one color?
3840 * 1600 * 4B / 1024 / 1024 = 23.4375MiB for uncompressed RGBA (four bytes per pixel).
That is, even if that thing was pure random pixels and would have to be stored uncompressed and you'd use a completely useless alpha channel you still don't hit 25M.
Guys out here sending BMPs…
I did some test, i was speaking from memory.
it depends on whats on screen.
Just desktop is 128kb but irl that rarely what i send to people.
Just my game launcher will bump that up to 5MB
But the 100% real experience i have is that is try to show someone a screenshot and i get a message that files are “too powerful” so i have conditioned myself to only show the relevant half of my screen.
So either that 25MB was a lie or i do frequently exceed it?
I specifically opened a few apps to break up any large blocks of one color.
That makes no sense. The 24MP RAW files from my camera at 25MB, no way a PNG or JPEG of a 4K (8MP) monitor are anywhere close to that big.
I did some test, i was speaking from memory so not very accurate.
it depends on whats on screen.
Just desktop is 128kb but irl that rarely what i send to people.
Just my game launcher will bump that up to 5MB
But the 100% real experience i have is that is try to show someone a screenshot and i get a message that file size is to big so i have conditioned myself to only show the relevant half of my screen.
Da fuck is your resolution?
I kinda wish we could go back to the world of people hosting their own servers and having subsets of their homedirs on ftp urls. Of course none of that is really approachable to a lot of a people :-(.
I am considering this. I am just looking into what uses the least power.
You can easily use something like a raspberry pi (or something else ARM-based like Friendlyelec CM3588) and attach some storage to it. It's really not difficult to setup a web server to share a directory.
Thanks, I will be looking into these.
No way 3,840 × 2,160x2=16,588,800 pixels 16,588,800 x 10 bits = 165,888,000 bits
165,888,000 bits / 8 bits/byte = 20,736,000 bytes
The issue is the absence of being able to port forward in a lot of places. UPNP exists on some networks but it's usually disabled. But if we want actual peer to peer we're going to need to implement some way to accept incoming connections EVERYWHERE.
IF ONLY WE COULD USE IPV6 WE WOULDNT BE HAVING THIS PROBLEM
YES FUCK YOU TOO COMCAST.
Comcast is one of the biggest IPv6 ISPs though?
Gonna be real here, I'm in tech, there is no fucking way I'm gonna open my PC to the entire fucking internet. Vulnerabilities are everywhere and no code is perfect. Firewalls and nat help stop so many attacks from the start.
Even if ipv6 is common I will assume most implementations will be nat based.
IPv6 does not require you to open your machine to the Internet, even without making use of a NAT. Sure you get an IP that's valid on the whole internet, but that doesn't mean that anyone can send you traffic.
brother, use a firewall. NAT does nothing for this, a single stateful firewall will do more for device security than a NAT existing solely by itself.
A nat doesn't even do anything other than provide some basic level of device anonymity. If you didn't have a firewall it would still be accessible, you would just need to either be really good at guessing ports, or sniff for traffic that's relevant lol.
Except the NAT device will stonewall traffic on every port except the ones I open, for my entire network, and then I can just worry about securing the software listening on those few ports, instead of having to worry about the firewalls on every device I own.
Tldr default nat behavior is a state full firewall.
that's literally what a stateful firewall does.
It only allows corresponding return traffic to outgoing traffic that a device has internally sent outwards.
if you disabled that, it wouldn't do that. But even a NAT without a stateful firewall might end up doing this depending on how it's configured and your open ports due to how the forwarding is handled. This is how we get around NATing for P2P traffic, though the trick is to just send two NATed users to the others ip and port at the same time to establish a connection that can "isAlive" from there. If you had no firewall you would only need to know the IP and port to do this.
plus not to mention you can run internal firewalls on each device specifically which would do basically the same thing anyway. But then again i don't use windows so that's way easier.
Yes, thank you for repeating what I just said, and justifying my desire for a nat. I do infact actually know a few things about computer networks and tcp/ip since I spent 7 years writing software to interface with and monitor them.
the only realistic scenario in which you would use a NAT under IPv6 is if you felt like using IPv4 addresses internally. Outside of that it serves very little purpose.
IPv6
What about it
it doesn't need NAT topology, at all. There is literally zero reason to use it. Direct P2P networking is so much easier over ipv6
Huh. I did not know that.
yeah, under IPv6 based home networking, you just assign a block of addresses to a home, 512 or something, for example, and then you just use a stateful firewall to do the same exact thing that a NAT + a stateful firewall would be doing on a traditional IPv4 network.
Nothing stops you from using a NAT if you felt like you wanted your networking to be more complicated for no reason. But you probably shouldn't.
There are potential benefits for the anonymization of traffic (though this is probably easy enough to defeat by simply sniffing for all traffic across the IP block) a denial of service wouldn't be super important anymore, as you could just engage in round robin across the other IPs, unless of course you DOS'd every IP all at once, but that would be super fucking obvious and trivial to deal with. Though it might kill an individual computer in the network due to traffic influx.
You could still engage in DHCP IP handouts, which would actually be beneficial in terms of traffic anonymization in this case. Especially on a high frequency basis. Similar to the effects of NATing on an IPv4 network.
Plus you could still grab a static IP address per device, and then just pass through firewall rules to allow external connections or whatever you please. No forwarding required.
No it's not
Next issue
Nice! They get less free identity data an own less copyright
on mobile it's just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
yknow, i would like to see reported figures as to why discord isn't actually able to host file sizes over a certain size...
The problem is discord never deletes files, no matter how old they are. So they have a perpetually growing storage need
seems like a skill issue to me. Surely they would delete them on the banishment of a server, old servers die pretty frequently. Channels are deleted. Etc.
These companies hoard data they might have an use for but not even know how yet. Training AI and shit. Deleting stuff ain't in their dictionary.
For real.
I emailed them once asking about how they were complying with GDPR regulations if they didn't allow users a way to delete all their message details, and didn't even have a procedure for GDPR requests, only their standard, much worse privacy-wise account deletion process. They claimed it was because they had a legitimate interest to keep any messages not individually deleted, so the chats would still look coherent after an account was deleted.
They only delete your message if you delete it individually, so naturally, I was concerned, since you can't delete messages in a server you were banned from, or left, and Discord provides no way for you to identify old messages in servers you're not currently in.
They eventually, supposedly, sent my concerns to their data privacy team.
They were then sued for 800,000 euros about a month or two later.
They still don't allow you to mass delete your message data. They really want to hold onto it for as long as they can.
we really do live in a dystopia don't we.
Anyway this seems like a great excuse to not limit the file uploads, and just pay for more storage considering you could like, sell it, but what do i know.
It is more like the data could make money in the future but is not making money right now so they don't have infinite money for storage. If they had I am sure they would be happy to increase free storage limits.
i guess we should ask google how they're doing with the 15gb of free storage thing.
Google has a lot more money
this is also true, but they do have a very successful platform, even though their two primary ventures youtube, and google, don't seem to be immediately productive, though i guess google drive storage is probably a different cost to a platform like discord since it's something people use every day.
Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
Matrix is the closest replacement, and XMPP can replicate some functionality too.
My vote is for Matrix
Matrix is a laggy dumpsterfire. Messages take longer to send in Matrix than they do in Lemmy, and Lemmy isn't even supposed to be a real-time chat app.
Did you blindly sign up for matrix.org?
What is the best instance with the largest user base?
Edit: and ...yes I did
I don't know. Why do you want a large user base?
Guessing at one reason:
It feels good to know that you’re not signing up for someone’s instance that they’re just trying out admining for the first time and maybe if they’re too busy to do the proper updates next weekend they’ll just close shop.
(And by shop I mean fantastic free volunteering effort of course!)
I'm sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
It's really not, though.
//////
ETA: I stick by my premise and my conclusion (storage management isn't expensive, and it's probably a Nitro thing), but my math may be wrong and my usage is apparently not normative. The costs are probably not so negligible, but I would still assume they aren't as low as they want us to think.
/////
Discord has 200,000,000 MAU. If every single one of them uploaded a file every month (of pretty much any size) and Discord tossed it into an AWS S3 IA bucket, it would cost them $500 to store that data. Their total S3 bill for storage would be five hundred US dollars. Storage is dirt cheap. AWS doesn't even charge per gigabyte on that storage type, it's so cheap; they charge for downloads.
So, ok. Let's talk downloads. If each of those files were 25GB and downloaded twice (probably an underestimate, but not everyone is uploading files, so I'm going to make the completely unfounded assumption that it'll all shake out), it would cost them a couple hundred thousand dollars. Which, ok, that's much more significant than $500. But Discord made $575 million last year—so the S3 download costs would be 0.03% of their total revenue. They probably spend 2-3 times more on coffee.
Storage management is emphatically not expensive.
My guess? They just saw that the higher upload limit was eating into their Nitro subscriptions.
If every one of those users uploads one 10MB file, that would be two petabytes of data. At S3's IA prices that's $25k/month. And people are uploading far, far more data than that.
I'll have to check my math again. But are people uploading more than that? On my friend server, with 50 people, we've had about a dozen uploads all year, and they're all pretty small PDFs and images. Everything else is rich links.
Pictures.
Which are automatically downloaded by every active user of the chat on every individual client, and many people do at least tens per day.
Interesting. We don't upload many pictures, either; though admittedly I hadn't thought about it, and that probably doubles my total.
It’s heavily used at many universities. Think notes, images of whiteboards, full textbooks, pictures of tests, shared multiples times daily by tens of thousands of people. It adds up very fast.
Ahh, right. I've made the classic mistake of thinking my usage was normative.
Discord continues down it's path to total enshittification, which is exactly what I told everyone would happen when this fucking dogshit app got pushed on me around 2018 or so.
It's a private company with a profit motive. Fucking shocker that it enshittifies. /s
Fucking dipshit gamers not knowing any better.
I was promoting Matrix/Riot.IM (now Element) and nobody gave a shit because it was too hard to use even though it mostly has the same interface as Discord. (Which, by the way, fuck this interface.)
What an overreaction. Also FYI the free file limit was 8MB two years ago before they raised the limit to 25MB, so if anything it's gotten better.
Yeah the file limit on Skype is 300mb and has been for like a decade. Gamers are the dumbest fucking demographic on planet earth.
calm down man, no need to be so rude :(
You’re upset that I said the f-word @IntergalacticTurtleFucker@lemmy.world
Jk
Look, I'm as upset as you are about the enshittification of everything, but this is a bit too far.
There was always legitimate issues with Discord's storage management, and they at least seem to be taking it seriously now.
I'm not a massive fan of Discord, but this is a bit of an overreaction.
Ok but why are you so angry about it?
I’ve been using it for years and haven’t had to pay a dime.
How have they harmed you with their free app?
Because if you didn't expect this path when you signed up you were naive.
Now everyone complains about it but for people who had already been paying attention: this was par for the course. Of course this was going to be the outcome. Why should I be happy that everyone fell for the promises of a for-profit private company again?
Like why do you think we are on Lemmy for fucks sake? Is it not for the same reasons??
How many times do we have to be fucked by private corporations for people to learn they don't care about us?
But every time its all "but they have a better feature set so its okay that they might enshittify in the long-run!" Literally same shit is being said about Bluesky over Mastodon right now. Bluesky being a Public Benefit Corporation means about as much as OpenAI being a non-profit.
You didn't even come close to answering the question. So I'll ask again.
How were you harmed by Discord?
That wooshing sound you hear over your head is you willfully missing the point entirely.
*woosh
The problem being, there aren't many alternatives around for discord. And even the ones that exist have issues of their own. Mostly relating to use base and entry barrier, in the case of the open source alternatives.
No, literally the problem is most people would rather give in and use a sleek corporate option every time.
No matter how many times they get fucked by doing that.
It's a choice to keep getting fucked.
Lololol y'all are insane.
I've been using discord for free for like 8 years now. But now I can only share 10mb files and I'M FUCKED 🤣
So much entitlement.
Anything that wants to meaningfully compete with Discord will probably also need to be able to near-seamlessly port over existing Discord servers to the new platform, since it's so established now. Is there a competitor that can do that?
I'm completely out of the loop, so I might as well ask you: where is discord so established? Never used it in my life. I used IRC, ICQ and MSN in their time. Now for work Slack, teams and zoom. Signal and Telegram privately. Email for everything.
What am I missing? What does discord provide?
Unfortunately, a lot of fandom communities, video games, and (ugh) hobbyist development projects have Discard servers instead of a forum or similar.
It provides a weird IRC-but-not-really type experience that is similar to MSN in some ways. A lot of younger people flock to it because they find computer stuff difficult and they just want it to work, be easy, and have an app. The UI is trendy even though it's horrible to actually navigate due to all the wasted space and buttons.
I really just think it caught on at the right time, though the video calling is pretty good. What I have a problem with is that you need to join a server to access any information inside of it, so it's not searchable from outside of the Discord ecosystem. For dev projects or large communities, that sucks and makes the internet a worse place.
Personally I originally went to Discord because it was the alternative to skype which was increasingly becoming shittier and shittier when Microsoft bought it.
Discord is great as chat program. It should've only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should've had very little value to any decent organization.
Discord is used a lot for gaming groups, modding, software development, and has largely replaced forums for lots of niche communities
Which is unfortunate. Hiding projects, code and support behind discord is just wrong.
There are Linux and open source communities on discord. I mean, just think about that for a second. These people have chosen to put their stuff on a platform that has refused to acknowledge the existence of their OS / development platform. Every other post on Reddit in the Linux community before I left was about some half assed discord workaround.
You sure about that part? I thought they shut down. I guess they might have some user-based servers?
if you read the whole sentence it might make more sense...
Discord is fashionable. That’s it. The whole app is fantastically impractical if you want to use file or screen sharing. It’s just a bunch of gamers circle-jerking each other, which is a perfect way to keep them from infesting the rest of the internet.
I say this with all due respect: Who gives a shit? If you were foolish enough to dump your entire community into Discord alone and don't have an off-ramp, that's your own fucking problem.
EDIT: Also, Matrix already has a bridge for Discord and has for a while:
https://matrix.org/ecosystem/bridges/discord/
Who gives a shit? The people who use it that you apparently want to switch to something else, for one. Shouldn't it be easy to switch, like going from Chrome to Firefox? That's how we get out of Discord hell.
Say you have no idea how any of this works without saying you have no idea how any of this works.
Why is it our job to fix the problems of a private, profit-focused company?
We're not fixing Discord's problems, oh my god. We're trying to get their existing users to go somewhere else even though it's what's familiar and Discord works for them.
Also it's definitely possible to code an import tool that scrapes a given server for info on how to structure things on the new platform, so idk what you think you're gaining by insulting my comparison to an aspect of a service that makes users motivated to switch.
I don't know who shat in your coffee, but get a fucking new cup.
Honestly the onboarding for a lot of alternatives to various to popular platforms/apps (Matrix, Mastodon, etc) seems to be the biggest impediment to more adoption of those platforms and apps.
By onboarding here I mean the communities that use those platforms recruiting others to join them and help build communities up.
Like goddamn if that users comment was the first time I'd heard of Matrix it would have turned me away for sure.
Not to mention Mastodon having a reputation that proceeds it.
Yes, exactly! At this point, some of these communities have been on Discord for years and have specialized bots for certain tasks. They don't want to start over, and I don't want them to either - there's tons of real work that these communities have put in. I think that these messaging services that want to make headway in the space Discord occupies need to reduce the friction in switching because a lot of Discord admins do believe that the feature set is better, they just can't easily move over.
This happens to organizations all the time and it's a known issue - Discord communities are no different. I'm hoping something comes along in the next few years if it doesn't already exist in its infancy right now. Even at the user level, I know many people are confused about Matrix. I don't know how exactly to fix these issues, but they need to be priorities.
LITERALLY UNUSABLE 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Discord is fine for 99% of users.
The people downvoting you are the ones who eat up the enshittificaion. Discord is unusable for anyone who wants file or screen sharing. Skype, by contrast, has screen sharing that’s smoother and higher quality, and a file sharing limit of 300mb, all free for the last decade.
But yeah most users are barely computer literate so Discord keeps humming along.
Skype was annoying to use and so is element
Oh, I know. It's squarely aimed at fucking tools who don't even own a PC, which is why it has that "mobile first" design ethos even though their mobile apps are absolute trash.
It doesn't matter how many times this happens, people would rather get fucked by corpos than spend time learning anything.