- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.ml
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.
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on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere
Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
No it’s not
Next issue
“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.
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.
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.
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.
You think they spend 400000 on coffee? You lost me there.
After looking at their number of employees and some math, I could actually see that as plausible.
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.
Discord offers automatic compression for images uploaded from mobile, but not from desktop IIRC. It’s weird.
Could anyone explain the attraction of discord? To me it’s UX is atrocious.
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…
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
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.
There’s no open source equivalent that does seamless audio and video streaming on every platform.
There is one actually.
It’s obviously a WIP. A discord clone essentially
Last time I checked you can’t even share your screen
dealbreaker
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.
It’s the place where things like game communities use primarily for instant chat.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link
You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.
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
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 )
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
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 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.
The thing is, I did have encryption keys set up. The problem was that Element would repeatedly forget the very encryption keys passed by the other user, and would then have to request the keys again. Any historical message history would be permanently encrypted forever, and wouldn’t decrypt with the new view key.
After this happened about 4 times, I stopped using it, because it was impossible to maintain conversations for longer than 1-2 weeks before they’d inevitably be lost, and I’d then have to spend about an hour waiting for Element to receive the new encryption keys from the people I was contacting, even when they were already actively online.
I have no clue what was causing it, but it happened on multiple accounts, on multiple devices, all the time, and there was no conceivable fix. I’m not sure if this is fixed now, but I haven’t had a good reason to go back, especially with other encrypted messaging options out there.
I don’t know how you loose your keys all the time. But in that case you really should use a key backup.
Lose*
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: https://plugins.mau.bot/
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
Being part of multiple servers becomes such a painful experience with that interface…even with the “folders” and the search palette.
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!
Removed by mod
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.
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.
esstee
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.
