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.
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.
Because you don’t need to have significant experience or rent a VPS in order to do that, and I can respect that
I’m not saying you have to self-host… You could still use something that’s open-source and remotely hosted.
Sentry (error logging and bug reporting system) is like this for example. They have a hosted plan, including a generous free plan for open-source projects, but Sentry itself is open-source.
It is, but then again many (most) are hosted on GitHub.
It was a matter of time honestly
As long as cattle keeps using these white products, there will always be a merchant to sell their data.
We clearly have poorly educated population that can’t be bothered with anything besides blind consumption of whatever is trendy.
Plastic clothes, goyslop and data harvesting apps is essentially the condition of the modern wage slave and they appear to be satisfied.
Here we see the Common Incel in his natural habitat, trolling for reactions in his perpetually online state of being. Nature.
Proper Nomanclature is “wage slave”
Thank you :)
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
I guess locking basic features behind a paywall didn’t work for them after all, eh?
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.
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.
You can easily use something like a raspberry pi (or something else ARM-based like Friendlyelec CM3588) and attach some storage to it. It’s really not difficult to setup a web server to share a directory.
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.
Da fuck is your resolution?
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.
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.
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’m sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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!
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/
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Could anyone explain the attraction of discord? To me it’s UX is atrocious.
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
It’s the place where things like game communities use primarily for instant chat.
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…
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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