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.
Huh, I wonder how enshitified it has to get before I stop seeing discord on FOSS projects.
It begins lol.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You definitely use a firewall, but there’s no need for NAT in almost all cases with ipv6. But even with a firewall, p2p becomes easier even if you still have to do firewall hole punching
Comcast is one of the biggest IPv6 ISPs though?
not big enough.
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.
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?)
this is true, but the problem is that it’s really complicated, and not always reliable. Mostly due to NATing within the networks. Firewalls don’t help but you can get around those easily enough.
There’s no guarantee that you’ll get a reliable P2P network connection over a NAT unless one peer isn’t NATed. Which is unlikely.
TL;DR we would probably ddos the internet very quickly if we tried at the scale of something like discord.
Isn’t that what things like wormhole are made to deal with?
Firefox: Browser missing required feature. This application needs support for WebSockets, WebRTC, and WebAssembly.
Where do you see that? I just sent a file from Firefox on Debian to Vivaldi on Android with it to test.
There’s also just plain wormhole (https://github.com/magic-wormhole/magic-wormhole) as an application for Windows, Mac, and Linux if that web instance doesn’t work.
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 :-(.
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, which cant be that long ago i only own this monitor for a year.
Reimplement the old WASTE client from the Nullsoft dude, this time with proper encryption and security and let’s call it a day.
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.
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.
on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere
Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
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 )
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.
the enshitification will go faster now i bet
Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
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?
The first time yeah, but I tried it again on another instance and it was better (at least it didn’t fail to load half the time), but still super slow. The 2nd time is what I was talking about.
Yeah, pick literally any other instance. I went with Mozilla’s, but there are plenty of alternatives. Or host your own!
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!)
Matrix.im maybe? I wouldn’t know.
Try Element X if you have a mobile. It’s rebuilt on the new sdk and offers a new architecture that has messages come in way faster than on Element (original)
My homeserver is a one-person Conduit installation, and slowness is not something I have encountered. However, in groupchats that happened to be encrypted there were moments when my messages failed to decrypt for others. That might’ve been due to my own carelessness with the VPS though.
It works tho!
I haven’t heard of Matrix but I’ve heard of Revolt.
Matrix any good?
Revolt tries to be a discord clone/replacement and suffer from some of the same issues. Matrix happens to have a lot of feature in common, but is focused on privacy and security at its core.
Revolt is the only feature-rich swap in option.
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I’d be down if Discord offered optional/default compression for images/videos. Yeah maybe 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.
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
