Submitted 2 months ago by ForgottenFlux@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
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.
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.
Fucking dipshit gamers not knowing any better.
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.
I saw this headline and was thinking, “Huh, I thought the limit was 8MB.”
Yeah the file limit on Skype is 300mb and has been for like a decade. Gamers are the dumbest fucking demographic on planet earth.
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 payin 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?
LITERALLY UNUSABLE 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Discord is fine for 99% of users.
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.
The people downvoting you are the ones who eat up the enshittificaion with glee. Discord is unusable for anyone who wants file or screen sharing. Skype, by contrast, has free screen sharing that’s smoother and higher quality, and a file sharing limit of 300mb all for free.
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.
Huh, I wonder how enshitified it has to get before I stop seeing discord on FOSS projects.
It begins lol.
discord on FOSS projects
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.
It is, but then again many (most) are hosted on GitHub.
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.
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?
Da fuck is your resolution?
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.
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.
Once an end-to-end, encrypted, connection is established between a pair of peers then anything can be sent through it. The establishment proces is generally facilitated by a server of some description so neither peer needs to allow inbound connections. (I’m a long, long way from being an expert on this and happy to be corrected - but this seems like network fundamentals?)
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.
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
See my edit.
I am probably remembering this from when the limit was 8MB
Not that the functionality does not exist (p2p, literally) but if my grandma cant receive the family pictures its not basic.
What about encrypted messaging apps? Maybe your grandma can’t figure out Signal, but she could probably work out how to use WhatsApp (which uses the same encryption protocol) given how popular it is in some countries.
Whatsapp is a product of Meta and files would still pass their proprietary servers. Let alone the metadata they collect.
Singal can do actual p2p userdevice to userdevice. Only if thats not possible it will use temporary servers for storage. But i am actually against that, id prefer if the file would not send until a p2p connection is established.
On paper the encryption of whatsapp is about as secure as Signal but can we trust Facebook to not implement a backdoor?. There open source llm-ai (llama) is by far the most intelligent model for its size. I plore people to ask what data Meta used to archive that result.
Reimplement the old WASTE client from the Nullsoft dude, this time with proper encryption and security and let’s call it a day.
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.
I moved a big group off Discord last year to Matrix chat (Element). It’s been largely pretty alright. 100mb upload limit, we have a bot that downloads tiktoks/Instagram/reddit videos and uploads them to the channel so you never have to visit the sites. Pretty nice! Open source and federated, you guys should give it a try!
Matrix is nice, but it’s still very bad UX wise.
I’ve used it on and off for years now, and about 2-4 times a month it loses my chat view encryption keys, and loses me my entire chat history. It also regularly has sync issues between devices signed into the same account, and is relatively slow sometimes to send messages.
Of course, that’s just my anecdotal experience, but I’ve tried many messaging platforms over the years, and while Matrix (and multiple of its clients, primarily Element) is the most feature-complete compared to Discord, it’s nowhere near properly usable long-term for a mass-market audience.
I agree, the security key thing is a bit of an issue. However this might a bit of a user error as well. The thing to understand is that Encryption keys are not stored on Matrix.org. If they were, then Matrix.org (or whatever homeserver you’re using) would be able to decrypt everything you can can decrypt, thus making Matrix pretty useless. The solution is that keys are only stored locally on your devices. Keys are shared to other devices using the Verification process and Emoji matching thing. The problem is most users just go “Whatever!” And ignore the verification process and then have a bad experience because they don’t have Encryption keys.
I don’t know how you loose your keys all the time. But in that case you really should use a key backup.
we have a bot that downloads tiktoks/Instagram/reddit videos and uploads them to the channel
Would love to see the implementation!
I like bringing stuff to the fediverse by way of cobalt.tools -> catbox.moe (shoutout Catbox for so much 100% free hotlink bandwidth) (also the owner’s trying to find a CSAM content ID solution that’s not super expensive FYI y’all)
Would love to see the implementation!
I’m using Maubot in a docker container with the Social Media Download Plugin. Here is a list of all the plugins: plugins.mau.bot
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
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.
There’s no open source equivalent that does seamless audio and video streaming on every platform.
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.
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…
It’s the place where things like game communities use primarily for instant chat.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Unlike other platforms, we store your files for as long as you need them, so it is crucial that we manage our storage sustainably
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
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
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.
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 )
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
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
yknow, i would like to see reported figures as to why discord isn’t actually able to host file sizes over a certain size…
I’d be down if Discord offered optional/default compression for images/videos. Yeah naybe my photos are 10 MB each, but with a slight quality loss they can get under 1 MB. Telegram does it well.
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
“Storage management is expensive”
It’s really not, though. 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.
Matrix works pretty good.
Mine changed back to 8MB from 25MB a few weeks ago and it really does cut the about of stuff you can send without having to run them through compression or just host externally.
I’m sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
That’s shitty times thar you have to use tools for pirating like torrent, Usenet to share big files . For smaller ones even email providers have bigger limits at least 15 megabytes
It… Is?
The user base has changed. Before it used to be used by young people willing to share their parts of lives, exchanging f.e. studying material Now it is used by mostly older people (over 30) having family not willing that much to share anything from their lives except from talking to their relatives over the messanger.
So who creates the information today? I guess bots and sometimes some facebook groups but I noticed that facebook shares your group posts to absolutely not related people to that group.
Including your mum and sister, the posts related on smoking weed and going to techno parties.
Young people (Gen-Z) don’t use facebook pretty much at all. Sometimes maybe messanger because of their family
Nice! They get less free identity data an own less copyright
No it’s not
Next issue
Good, fuck gen z kiddos
Gormadt@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 months ago
It was a matter of time honestly
orl0pl@lemmy.world 2 months ago
You mean auto deleting?