5mo ago

Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”

www.dexerto.com Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive” - Dexerto

Discord is lowering the upload limit for free users from 25MB to 10MB, citing operational and financial reasons.

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.

Technology @lemmy.zip

BrikoX @lemmy.zip

5mo ago

Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”

www.dexerto.com /tech/discord-lowers-free-upload-limit-to-10mb-storage-management-is-expensive-2887809/

24 5

Technology @lemmy.ml

moe90 @feddit.nl

5mo ago

Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”

www.dexerto.com /tech/discord-lowers-free-upload-limit-to-10mb-storage-management-is-expensive-2887809/

336 140

225 comments

It was a matter of time honestly
- You mean auto deleting?

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.
- 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

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.
  
  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: https://plugins.mau.bot/

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?
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
  
  IPv6
  
  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?)
  
  Isn't that what things like wormhole are made to deal with?
- 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.
- 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. I refuse to use Facebook related products on principle. (Mostly stopped using google and microsoft products also)
  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.

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.
  https://github.com/revoltchat
  It's obviously a WIP. A discord clone essentially
- 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.

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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.

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

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.

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

Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
- My vote is for Matrix
  
  I haven't heard of Matrix but I've heard of Revolt.
  Matrix any good?
- Matrix is the closest replacement, and XMPP can replicate some functionality too.
- Revolt is the only feature-rich swap in option.
- There isn't a full alternative, but if you just want text chat with some voice chat added on there are options like Matrix.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Mine changed back to 8MB from 25MB a few weeks ago and it really does cut the amount of stuff you can send without having to run them through compression or just host externally.

It... Is?

I'm sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!

No it's not
Next issue

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

Nice! They get less free identity data an own less copyright

Removed by author

“Storage management is expensive”
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.
- 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.
  
  Discord has ~1,000 employees… let’s say 0% remote (heh, is it 100% or what?)
  Avg of ~65% of employees (650 employees) drink coffee
  Average of 3 cups of coffee per day per employee
  260 work days per year
  Cups per year:
  650 employees x 3 cups per day x 260 work days = 507,000 cups per year
  For medium-sized office of 100 employees, cost of a turnkey delivery service is $15,000/yr ($0.68/cup)
  So for Discord:
  $0.68 per cup x 507,000 cups per year = $344,760 per year

225 comments