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I’m surprised they didn’t put a time limit on the storage since they are not a file hosting platform.
Honestly, I’ve always been surprised they allow any direct file transfers, instead of having to use external links.
I find it weird that they upload content to their own servers even when you provide them with an external link.
They want the data
Clicking an external link exposes your IP address to the server. All someone has to do is send a link that looks like something you want but actually just logs your ip address and you’re doxxed.
Lol, I already saw that happening in a server
I thought they did that at the start of the year
I know there’s been several news items regarding file changes to links within discord, like Link Expiration, file size increase for free users, and all i found from a quick search was this reddit post talking about how their file wasnt deleted, but the link directs to discord saying “This content is no longer available.”
I don’t know how long it is, but to wether or not it was removed by discord, or file expired, im not sure
so many people left reddit and fled to discord. So sad. Discord was ALWAYS going to enshittify itself to death, but okay people.
As a forum-like community like Reddit it was always shit to begin with.
Still light years ahead of FB groups tho
That’s not the biggest accomplishment.
Man, you should have seen forums at hobby sites, etc in the times before Reddit/Digg…
At least those forums store information in threads. Discord is just an endless stream of blabber.
Agreed. Or worse: for documentation!
Was looking into some FOSS tools, the ones that say discord I automatically skip, imo it’s not future proof.
Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.
Well that didn’t last very long. It was 8 MB for like six years and then it just went to 25 MB maybe a year ago and now we’re back down to 10 MB.
I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is
And standard screenshots of my desktop are ~30mb, I was lucky to upload it lol
What format are you saving them in? BMP? Try png.
I am using png. Level 0 compression tho and in 4k (3840*2160), sometimes even 4k + 2*1440p (2560*1440), but it’s already too large with just my main 4k monitor.
Why 0 compression?
Because it was never a problem. It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding, and no service ever had problems with the file size. Especially not my selfhosted stuff. Every service, except discord. As I now have resorted to using Vencord or just uploading most media to Nextcloud, I don’t have that many issues with it anymore, anyway.
You know PNG is lossless compression right?
Yes. But in theory it’s still a performance hit, and as I have enough local storage (and typically use services with high limits), and I’m too lazy to change grims config just for discord, I never changed it and used Vencord instead.
PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn’t gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about
Or they could just compression for their PNGs. PNG is a lossless format so they’ll only lose a fraction of a second during creation.
JPEG for graphics like screenshots is not very efficient. For stuff like that, png is simply superior. (But not with compression 0)
PNG is not good for photos though.
I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.
Hah. Hahaha. Hahahahahahaahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Just to be clear, I 100% think they are selling our data. What I meant was I’m surprised they’re concerned about the size of the uploads when they could just be selling the uploaded data.
For the record, they still claim that they do not sell user information nor data.
Giving it to China for free isn’t selling. Its just called “investor relations”
Any proof, or just tinfoil?
Good point. Harder to parse would be my guess
Look up the Discord Summaries BETA.
They already have “AI” monitoring all chats.
It would be “stupid” of them to not abuse that. (Unmorally stupid that is)
aren’t they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it
They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won’t lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them
It would be legally stupid for them to abuse that.
discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive
Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:
Wait, I ~never was notified that it got to 25mb, I thought it was 8
It might have only even been like six months. It was in the little change log pop up during one of the updates at some point
I imagine China is using it for free since Tencent owns a 38% stake.
If Discord was open source, I actually would not mind paying a fee for it. Fixed or reccurring, ideally the former. But that’s never happening. And forget buying that Nitro thing.
revolt might catch up eventually
github.com/revoltchat
I hope you’re right.
Revolt looks close, but it isn’t self hosted so it is worthless. Revolt will eventually become what discord is if it got big enough.
I am tired of changing services, I want off this clown carousel of:
new product - gains popularity - enshitification
Same here, so unless something is fully open source, self hostable and preferably federating, I’m not picking it up.
They want to start charging for the malware they host.
If you know of any malware hosted by them you should report it too them.
They should’ve never increased the size to 25MB. Now everyone is mad they can’t upload files larger than 10MB, instead of being happy that Discord allows free file sharing up to 10MB.
That’s why you need to keep free product features and small and useless as possible; people will happily take improvements but complain to hell and back if you accidentally overcommit.
Meanwhile most Lemmy servers have an upload limit of what, a megabyte?
Most Lemmy servers don’t relentlessly track and sell everything you do though. Discord makes way more money off your data than it costs them to host.
Source that they make money off of uploaded files?
Didn’t necessarily mean the files but the service as a whole
I agree, but the argument here is “why won’t they let you upload more data if they make money off of it”. My point is that it doesn’t apply here, because uploaded files is not the data that can make them money.
Lemmy servers are radical open, everything short of your IP address is accessible over the activitypub protocol.
They’re not selling it, it’s free.
Is there finally a source that says Discord is selling your data?
Lol. Your data is worth maybe $5, maybe $10 if you discuss financial platforms often, there’s no way that’ll cover the costs of hosting media for years. Just watching or hosting a video stream every month will probably run you over the money your data is worth. Individual data is practically worthless, and aggregate data doesn’t sell for a lot when you divide the total worth by the amount of users covered.
Discord is alive because of their premium subscription, their data sales are just a little bonus on top. Their own statistics claim 200 million active users per months with 600 million in revenue per year. Those $3 per user start to run real thin when you’re essentially running a free S3 server with 8MB blobs.
Your data is worth about $5-$10 a month, at least for Facebook. A month.
And they don’t sell to Facebook, nor does it sell any ads to advertisers willing to pay that rate, so that’s a rather useless statistic.
The point was not the amount of money they are making, the point is that regardless you are being sold for profit. Any platform that is ad-driven should be avoided if you want any form of privacy.
But Discord isn’t ad driven, it’s driven by their premium subscriptions and their weird store. I’m sure they sell message data to AI companies like every other messenger these days, but they’re not a messenger like Signal is; they’re a space to hang out and game.
If anything, the exclusive deals mean your community posts only make it to fewer AI services. Publicly accessible places like Lemmy are scraped to death and share all manner of user behaviour by design.
As long as you don’t try to replace Signal by Discord, I don’t really see the problem to be honest. I’d switch to Matrix once Element becomes faster and less buggy and has decent video streaming capabilities and some of Discord’s features, but with the way things are going that’ll take a couple of years.
arstechnica.com/…/discord-starts-down-the-dangero…
They definitely sell user data. There is no doubt in my mind about it. I think the idea that Signal can’t be used in the same way is down to the marketing, especially sense Discord is now trying to transition away from gaming gamedeveloper.com/…/discord-is-pivoting-away-from… Signal literally has the same features + more than discord. You dont have to reveal your phone number to strangers anymore. Usernames are there. 1k+ member group chats EXIST. (I’m in one for fight for the future), screen sharing exists in calls. Theres no reason to need discord unless thats just where everyone else is.
Discord is one of the worst company in term of privacy, they sell all of your datas, messages… First to make profit and then send it to the Chinese government. Thx to offer to me 10MB 😁
Why exactly do you believe the Chinese government wants the messages of non-Chinese citizens? Because Discord is blocked in China proper.
They want people datas as much as US wants them to do mass surveillance. Surveillance is power and all govs wants power
They decreased it?? People always complain about max file sizes being too small.
Also, how is telegram able to offer 2 GB per file and 4 GB on premium? In comparison, that seems astronomical!
My guess is Telegram’s being bankrolled by entities that are willing to eat the cost of this kind of data usage.
I believe telegram manages that with severe upload and download speed limits, but Telegram has always been a bit shady, hasn’t it? Who knows how they financially support all that.
About 500MBit/s on Telegram Desktop. They currently have 10 million paying subscribers out of ~950 million users.
Telegrams billionaire founder claims that he is bankrolling the thing with his personal wealth. I’m pretty sure he also claimed at one point that the average user cost them $6 per year, or something along those lines.
plus a fraction of the users of discord
I gotta admit, I have no problem with introducing a completely new feature and locking it to paying members. But taking away an already existing feature from non-members, or limiting it in some way, is simply outrageous. They could’ve kept the upload limit at 25MB, and increased it for Nitro users to something like an entire gigabyte. This would’ve encouraged people to get Nitro. But lowering the upload limit for free users would just encourage them to leave and find an alternative (and the problem is that there aren’t any viable ones because they aren’t used as much).
So email came before Google. Email was good. You went to your computer and downloaded your inbox. You could either delete the email from the server and have it in your computer only or keep it in both places. With android and Google, the strategy was to give you an address that you couldn’t take with you anywhere, and to let you see and accumulate emails from any device such that your data could be used for AI and you couldn’t easily retain it and still use it globally. You can come up with your own email server, just not a gmail.com address. They own you until you just start elsewhere.
I mean, every giga company does this, and profits from it.
Can you tell I hate corporatism?
the free upload limit was only recently bumped to 25mb, it used to be 8mb
Heard that in a YouTube video.
This one in particular.
Exactly. And they didn’t even give the 25 MB limit to every user. Some users were always stuck at 8 MB, and others 25 MB. I’m the latter and I was blown away at the decision to cut the file size limit down to 1/3rd of what I was used to.
8mb.video
^ This website will compress videos down to 8 MB but the video quality ends up being awful, plus I’m not so sure how I feel about the privacy/security issues of uploading personal videos to some rando website so they can be compressed.
I REALLY hate this “rolling out” of new features. Seriously, I hate it. I remember Instagram doing it when pressing the screen during Reels playback, on some accounts it pauses, on others it simply mutes the video.
Good riddance, Instagram.
I am fortunate enough to know how to set up VMs and use Linux, so I run my own IRC server with a web interface (TheLounge). I can set the upload limit to what I want and settled for 100MB. This way my friends and I are not at the mercy of some proprietary software.
I do pay for a dedicated server that I also use to host my games’ servers and also a mumble server, but it’s so worth it, just to have control over our stuff.
Easy fix, don’t store any of it on the cloud. The client’s PC has plenty more than 25MB
Is there a discord replacement that isn’t matrix that does this?
I have no idea if these fit the bill Rocket chat Mattermost Revolt
Storage (and transfer and processing) has only ever gotten cheaper, but okay.
Yes but are your storage Managers doing anything? Going on long lunches and racking up bar tabs? Expensing escorts?
Sure it’s getting cheaper, but is it getting cheaper faster than their need for it?
I’ve always expected their business model was unsustainable probably only able to manage through venture capital and growth.
There’s hardly even any competition, their free product is substantial. Even fully funding a server is barely enough to cover a bare metal node.
This is just the introduction to cost savings. As they wade into market saturation, and still need to provide growth in numbers they’ll need to pinch the free users into paying and pinch the paying users into paying enough to fully fund the service. Of course it won’t stop there…
Edit: FFS dictation can’t ‘their’ it’s way out of a wet paper bag.
Maybe they should just delete their data every month. Holding 1 20mb file or 2 10mb files aren’t much different
Please discord die already
Until a viable alternative is presented, I doubt Discord will die anytime soon. Part of the problem is people have a hard time accepting that even if you make the best meal in town, you’ve gotta get people to step inside before they’ll try it. To an extent, this does involve winning a popularity contest of sorts if you want Discord to die.
I think often times folks are torn between enjoying a space/app as is, and making compromises to attract a larger group. IMO Linux has the same issue and that’s part of why die hard fanboys get so aggressively defensive when this is brought up.
It’s the software equivalent of being the bitter "nice guy" that simultaneously wants to attract a girlfriend (users) but is kind of an asshole to women. You might think you don’t stink but please wear deodorant.
Yeah i also don’t think it’s dying hence the plea. But thing is, i don’t want alternative. I want this shit to die so i never want to see “join our discord” spammed absolutely everywhere when i want to get some info on anything.
There are viable alteratives, but they aren’t making money and can’t advertise. Signal is a prime example, its an amazing platform with feature parity + more to Discord. Regardless of how well a platform is polished, you need users. People will use the shittiest platform ever if it has users (Twitter and Reddit come to mind).
Signal isn’t an alternative to Discord. I use both and they’re used very differently. Group movie watching for example is pretty easy on Discord.
Digg had users and people jumped ship to Reddit because it was better.
You can screen share on signal so that argument makes absolutely no sense. and people down voting me without explaining why are probably too stubborn to switch away from discord.
That’s a feature that was implemented what, 1 or 2 years ago when Signal’s been around for a decade?
You can’t possibly expect people to just jump from one social app to another that has such a relatively small user base and little familiarity. Entire Discord servers would have to jump ship and it would just be a nightmare for most people.
What Discord prioritizes, Signal treats as an afterthought. Things like group chat, video chat, GIF usage, etc, Signal has never really prioritized.
Discord’s mobile and PC apps both allow users to select GIFs within the application, whereas only Signal’s mobile app allows users to select GIFs within the application and Signal’s desktop app doesn’t allow for in-app GIF selection. If you’re reading this thinking "who tf cares about stupid stuff like that?", you’re completely missing the point because regular ass users care about stuff like that and they totally will say “fuck that” to an alternative if it doesn’t have features like this. Why doesn’t Signal incorporate in-app GIF selection for its desktop app? I’m sure it will be eventually implemented but dragging their heels like this for popular features and then having the nerve to ask "why aren’t people flocking to us instead of Discord/WhatsApp" is such an out of touch question to ask.
When open source developers ask for feedback from regular users and their response to said feedback is"ACKSHUALLY it’s your fault, not the application’s fault", as it often is, it’s no surprise that their software never gains traction. It’s like a guy who wears cargo pants to a formal affair and then gets into an argument over attire because in his mind, cargo pants = more pockets = superior, completely oblivious to every other factor.
Another thing-- Signal requires your phone number, Discord doesn’t. I know right away folks are going to rage about how Discord is the real privacy nightmare, not Signal. I don’t disagree, but the average user is just going to be more wary about being forced to give up their phone number in order to use Signal, even if the software now allows them to hide it.
People jumped ship because Digg turned into complete and utter garbage, and Reddit wasn’t completely awful. It was a weird site though, 100%.
Digg would’ve been fine had they not forced Digg v4 on users.
What’s a good voice-chat alternative then?
Before the discord plague i used Team Speak, it was sufficient.
TS has always, and I do mean always, been garbage.
No. I mean if you spend your entire life jumping between 30 rooms full of people then perhaps, but for just normal voice communication for meeting, gaming or RPG it was entirely sufficient.
I already use a different app for voice chat, and never used Discord’s voice chat feature.
Discord is a modern alternative to IRC, Slack, or a more fully featured version of Matrix. I never considered it for the voice chat feature.
People always bring up voice chat alternatives, which don’t replace Discord at all, because voice chat is a tiny unimportant feature of Discord that I wouldn’t notice if they removed.
Revolt, people
Revolt I love, but there’s no federation or anything, and I won’t be able to get anyone to switch unless they could join many servers from mine
Yeah, a federated alternative would be neat. Revolt has a lot of issues but kudos for the customizable UI.
Nah, xmpp is better.
How is it comparable to the layout?
To be clear, XMPP is the name of the protocol, not the app. If an XMPP app with a Discord-like UI is what you’re after, then Converse.js is probably your best bet. Here’s what it looks like.
Movim is another web UX option (comes with posts + feeds that can easily be crawled as well so you don’t have everything stuck in the black hole of chat).
That doesn’t have the server + Channel layout
Gajim can, but you have to create it yourself.
The clients are a bit under developed by progressing quickly, and are all open source.
The enshitification is progressing nicely!
I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.
I’m a sys admin/devops engineer, and yes, storage is far more expensive then people realize.
This is the very definition of enshittification.
EDIT: To those downvoting:
Do you actually know what the definition of enshittification is? Apparently not.
It doesn’t matter that the cost of storage is a real thing. They gave things of value away for free to grow their user base and to try and capture network effects. Now that they think they have that they are taking away ( or decreasing ) the free stuff of value they gave away.
The fact that storage has value is literally an important part of enshitification.
It wouldn’t be enshitification if they gave away free stuff that wasn’t valuable.
It’s not enshittification because it literally doesn’t follow the second part of your own definition. Needing to change your offerings because your internal prices increase is normal business. Enshittification literally is from companies offering stuff to entice users and then they realize they have nothing else to offer to businesses, so they remove features in order to sell them to businesses or to increase ads.
This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?
Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.
It’s not, everyone just loves to use the funny swearing buzzword
Except not, this is what social media is supposed to do, allow people to upload things to share. They’ve done perfectly well for all these years on it, it’s not some new crazy problem. It’s existing functionality they are removing, that’s on them.
Discord isn’t a social media. With platforms like facebook, you’re still paying for all your storage, just not with money. There’s ads all over the platform, and all your content is data mined to be sold to advertisers. Discord doesn’t data mine (to my knowledge) OR run ads. Would you prefer a higher limit at the cost of having ads all over the interface? The AWS bill has to get paid somehow, nothing is free.
Discord isn’t social media. What is with everyone just referring to every tech company product as “social media”!?
I use discord to keep up with what my friends are doing, look at pictures that they post, etc. We used to use Facebook for the same thing back when it was The Facebook and required a university email address and didn’t have ads. How is that not social media?
Just like YouTube. They need the ad revenue to keep all those videos saved to their servers. It’s only natural you watch a 30 second ad every 10 seconds. It isn’t enshittification because it’s a real thing that’s happening, and raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly.
I suspect the sarcasm detector of the downvoters might be faulty
Maybe but I’m not adding a /s for them
Based on all of the changes discord has made over the past few years, its absolutely enshittification
It’s a real issue. It’s amazing they allow it like it is now.
Discord’s enshitification continues.
A smaller size limit on what amounts to free file hosting isn’t exactly enshittification. Servers and hard drives aren’t free.
The process of enshitification is what I was referring to. Discord got super popular by providing users with lots of value for zero cost.
Now, in order to increase profits, they are reducing the scope of features they offer, and increasing the cost of the features that remain.
This will continue to slowly get worse, as users are more locked into Discord’s ecosystem and userbase, they will be further pressured to upgrade and pay more money for less stuff.
Uhoh, the widdle baby poopy pants corporation can’t handle doing their job. Maybe they can just get the fuck out of the way and let the real adults host our own shit?
I’ve never sent a picture through discord.
Also, if storing all that data is hard…trim all the chat logs after awhile…oh wait…then you wouldn’t be able to keep records of everything everyone’s ever done on there.
Seriously discord i was soo happy about the 25mb upload limit but there are better alternatives (lin.la pomf se,catbox)
to be fair though, the limit was 8MB originally, then they raised it to 25MB
good ol’ capitalism, corporations need ever growing profits