I gotta admit, I have no problem with introducing a completely new feature and locking it to paying members. But taking away an already existing feature from non-members, or limiting it in some way, is simply outrageous. They could’ve kept the upload limit at 25MB, and increased it for Nitro users to something like an entire gigabyte. This would’ve encouraged people to get Nitro. But lowering the upload limit for free users would just encourage them to leave and find an alternative (and the problem is that there aren’t any viable ones because they aren’t used as much).
So email came before Google. Email was good. You went to your computer and downloaded your inbox. You could either delete the email from the server and have it in your computer only or keep it in both places. With android and Google, the strategy was to give you an address that you couldn’t take with you anywhere, and to let you see and accumulate emails from any device such that your data could be used for AI and you couldn’t easily retain it and still use it globally. You can come up with your own email server, just not a gmail.com address. They own you until you just start elsewhere.
I mean, every giga company does this, and profits from it.
Can you tell I hate corporatism?
the free upload limit was only recently bumped to 25mb, it used to be 8mb
Heard that in a YouTube video.
Exactly. And they didn’t even give the 25 MB limit to every user. Some users were always stuck at 8 MB, and others 25 MB. I’m the latter and I was blown away at the decision to cut the file size limit down to 1/3rd of what I was used to.
^ This website will compress videos down to 8 MB but the video quality ends up being awful, plus I’m not so sure how I feel about the privacy/security issues of uploading personal videos to some rando website so they can be compressed.
I REALLY hate this “rolling out” of new features. Seriously, I hate it. I remember Instagram doing it when pressing the screen during Reels playback, on some accounts it pauses, on others it simply mutes the video.
Good riddance, Instagram.
Easy fix, don’t store any of it on the cloud. The client’s PC has plenty more than 25MB
Is there a discord replacement that isn’t matrix that does this?
I have no idea if these fit the bill Rocket chat Mattermost Revolt
Maybe they should just delete their data every month. Holding 1 20mb file or 2 10mb files aren’t much different
They decreased it?? People always complain about max file sizes being too small.
Also, how is telegram able to offer 2 GB per file and 4 GB on premium? In comparison, that seems astronomical!
I believe telegram manages that with severe upload and download speed limits, but Telegram has always been a bit shady, hasn’t it? Who knows how they financially support all that.
Telegrams billionaire founder claims that he is bankrolling the thing with his personal wealth. I’m pretty sure he also claimed at one point that the average user cost them $6 per year, or something along those lines.
About 500MBit/s on Telegram Desktop. They currently have 10 million paying subscribers out of ~950 million users.
plus a fraction of the users of discord
My guess is Telegram’s being bankrolled by entities that are willing to eat the cost of this kind of data usage.
I’ve never sent a picture through discord.
Also, if storing all that data is hard…trim all the chat logs after awhile…oh wait…then you wouldn’t be able to keep records of everything everyone’s ever done on there.
good ol’ capitalism, corporations need ever growing profits
Seriously discord i was soo happy about the 25mb upload limit but there are better alternatives (lin.la pomf se,catbox)
They should’ve never increased the size to 25MB. Now everyone is mad they can’t upload files larger than 10MB, instead of being happy that Discord allows free file sharing up to 10MB.
That’s why you need to keep free product features and small and useless as possible; people will happily take improvements but complain to hell and back if you accidentally overcommit.
Meanwhile most Lemmy servers have an upload limit of what, a megabyte?
Most Lemmy servers don’t relentlessly track and sell everything you do though. Discord makes way more money off your data than it costs them to host.
Lemmy servers are radical open, everything short of your IP address is accessible over the activitypub protocol.
They’re not selling it, it’s free.
Source that they make money off of uploaded files?
Didn’t necessarily mean the files but the service as a whole
I agree, but the argument here is “why won’t they let you upload more data if they make money off of it”. My point is that it doesn’t apply here, because uploaded files is not the data that can make them money.
Is there finally a source that says Discord is selling your data?
Discord makes way more money off your data than it costs them to host
Lol. Your data is worth maybe $5, maybe $10 if you discuss financial platforms often, there’s no way that’ll cover the costs of hosting media for years. Just watching or hosting a video stream every month will probably run you over the money your data is worth. Individual data is practically worthless, and aggregate data doesn’t sell for a lot when you divide the total worth by the amount of users covered.
Discord is alive because of their premium subscription, their data sales are just a little bonus on top. Their own statistics claim 200 million active users per months with 600 million in revenue per year. Those $3 per user start to run real thin when you’re essentially running a free S3 server with 8MB blobs.
The point was not the amount of money they are making, the point is that regardless you are being sold for profit. Any platform that is ad-driven should be avoided if you want any form of privacy.
But Discord isn’t ad driven, it’s driven by their premium subscriptions and their weird store. I’m sure they sell message data to AI companies like every other messenger these days, but they’re not a messenger like Signal is; they’re a space to hang out and game.
If anything, the exclusive deals mean your community posts only make it to fewer AI services. Publicly accessible places like Lemmy are scraped to death and share all manner of user behaviour by design.
As long as you don’t try to replace Signal by Discord, I don’t really see the problem to be honest. I’d switch to Matrix once Element becomes faster and less buggy and has decent video streaming capabilities and some of Discord’s features, but with the way things are going that’ll take a couple of years.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/04/discord-starts-down-the-dangerous-road-of-ads-this-week/
They definitely sell user data. There is no doubt in my mind about it. I think the idea that Signal can’t be used in the same way is down to the marketing, especially sense Discord is now trying to transition away from gaming https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/discord-is-pivoting-away-from-games-to-become-your-place-to-talk- Signal literally has the same features + more than discord. You dont have to reveal your phone number to strangers anymore. Usernames are there. 1k+ member group chats EXIST. (I’m in one for fight for the future), screen sharing exists in calls. Theres no reason to need discord unless thats just where everyone else is.
The ads Discord implements aren’t like the ads that track your every move online. This is basic product placement. I’m not even opposed to that as long as they keep it minimal and remove that shit from the paid subscriptions.
Signal doesn’t have anything close to the Discord experience. It lacks basic interaction patterns like channels. Voice calls work completely differently from a conversation standpoint. I don’t think Signal even implements threads, if it does I’ve never been able to find them. The UI for managing things like emotes/sticker packs is a lot better, especially for communities.
The there are the advanced features. Webhooks are used quite often for automation. Forums and discussion boards are used by larger communities. Roles and access control don’t exist in Signal because it doesn’t have a concept of communities.
Discord is much closer to Slack and Teams and Mattermost than it is to Signal and Telegram and WhatsApp and iMessage. On the protocol level, all of that could be implemented by exchanging special messages between devices, but the only app Signal devs want you to use contain none of that. Signal does have stuff Discord doesn’t have, such as encryption and cruptocurrency built in, but neither seem to be dealbreakers for everyone else.
You don’t need to use Discord, nor do you need to use Signal. I have Signal, but nobody else does. You don’t need to convince me, convince everyone else, because my Signal conversation list has been empty for months since I last reinstalled my custom ROM.
I’m sure Signal can be used in the same way as Discord, in the way you can technically run a copy of Microsoft Word on the PlayStation if you stack enough hacks on top of each other. For the vast majority of the user base, that’s not going to happen.
Your data is worth about $5-$10 a month, at least for Facebook. A month.
And they don’t sell to Facebook, nor does it sell any ads to advertisers willing to pay that rate, so that’s a rather useless statistic.
Discord is one of the worst company in term of privacy, they sell all of your datas, messages… First to make profit and then send it to the Chinese government. Thx to offer to me 10MB 😁
Why exactly do you believe the Chinese government wants the messages of non-Chinese citizens? Because Discord is blocked in China proper.
They want people datas as much as US wants them to do mass surveillance. Surveillance is power and all govs wants power
Power to do what, exactly? It’s not like China is going to get non-citizens extradited from their home country to punish them for saying bad things about the CPC. Believing in vague generalities doesn’t help anyone, you’ve got to be specific.
You should know that in this world most of the governments want to extand their “power” (in fact it’s the good world), by knowing all the stuffs that are happening in the world they gain some superior knowledge. Why do states are willing to do mass surveillance, to use security cameras, etc… It’s not to have more “citizens” but to gain more power
to be fair though, the limit was 8MB originally, then they raised it to 25MB
so many people left reddit and fled to discord. So sad. Discord was ALWAYS going to enshittify itself to death, but okay people.
As a forum-like community like Reddit it was always shit to begin with.
Man, you should have seen forums at hobby sites, etc in the times before Reddit/Digg…
At least those forums store information in threads. Discord is just an endless stream of blabber.
Agreed. Or worse: for documentation!
Still light years ahead of FB groups tho
That’s not the biggest accomplishment.
Was looking into some FOSS tools, the ones that say discord I automatically skip, imo it’s not future proof.
If Discord was open source, I actually would not mind paying a fee for it. Fixed or reccurring, ideally the former. But that’s never happening. And forget buying that Nitro thing.
revolt might catch up eventually
Revolt looks close, but it isn’t self hosted so it is worthless. Revolt will eventually become what discord is if it got big enough.
I am tired of changing services, I want off this clown carousel of:
new product - gains popularity - enshitification
Same here, so unless something is fully open source, self hostable and preferably federating, I’m not picking it up.
I hope you’re right.
Dammit now I have to reduce the block size of my discord-based cold storage filesystem.
They want to start charging for the malware they host.
If you know of any malware hosted by them you should report it too them.
Well that didn’t last very long. It was 8 MB for like six years and then it just went to 25 MB maybe a year ago and now we’re back down to 10 MB.
I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is
I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is
Hah. Hahaha. Hahahahahahaahahahahahaha. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
Just to be clear, I 100% think they are selling our data. What I meant was I’m surprised they’re concerned about the size of the uploads when they could just be selling the uploaded data.
For the record, they still claim that they do not sell user information nor data.
Giving it to China for free isn’t selling. Its just called “investor relations”
Any proof, or just tinfoil?
I simply don’t trust any company that provides a “free” service and is owned by Tencent, who has a 35% stake in Discord.
Neither do I, which is why I would love evidence to confirm my suspicions, so I can show it to others.
But I also try not to make claims that are merely suspicious, however likely.
Good point. Harder to parse would be my guess
“by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is”
I imagine China is using it for free since Tencent owns a 38% stake.
Look up the Discord Summaries BETA.
They already have “AI” monitoring all chats.
It would be “stupid” of them to not abuse that. (Unmorally stupid that is)
And standard screenshots of my desktop are ~30mb, I was lucky to upload it lol
What format are you saving them in? BMP? Try png.
I am using png. Level 0 compression tho and in 4k (3840*2160), sometimes even 4k + 2*1440p (2560*1440), but it’s already too large with just my main 4k monitor.
Why 0 compression?
Because it was never a problem. It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding, and no service ever had problems with the file size. Especially not my selfhosted stuff. Every service, except discord. As I now have resorted to using Vencord or just uploading most media to Nextcloud, I don’t have that many issues with it anymore, anyway.
It’s a little bit faster for encoding and decoding
On the other hand, the time spent uploading/downloading much smaller files probably more than makes up for that, although even that difference might get pretty small with modern internet connections.
Especially in times where using WiFi is faster than ethernet, because my network ports are only gigabit.
Because it was never a problem.
But you literally started this thread because it’s a problem. And then you spent more time defending your bad choice on a Lemmy discussion than you will ever save in your entire life decompressing PNGs.
How does Vencord help with the upload limit?
You know PNG is lossless compression right?
Yes. But in theory it’s still a performance hit, and as I have enough local storage (and typically use services with high limits), and I’m too lazy to change grims config just for discord, I never changed it and used Vencord instead.
Why do you think it’s a performance hit?
Because even though it saves over 29 MB, it also takes more than 20 times as long. And that’s just on my laptop, 1920x1080 + 2*1680x1050. On my PC it’s even worse.
I have thousands of GB of high speed storage, Gigabit internet, but only a Ryzen 5 2600 and a i5-1145G7.
PNG started out as ZIP(BMP) and hasn’t gotten that much better. Use JPEG. The pixels you lose are not worth crying about
JPEG for graphics like screenshots is not very efficient. For stuff like that, png is simply superior. (But not with compression 0)
PNG is not good for photos though.
why though? The graphics represented in the screen are already squashed and scaled, so you wouldn’t be preserving their quality in any case. If you’re worried about text, JPEG should still be able to handle it under high quality settings
We can ask the same the other way around: why do you want to use jpg if it results in a bigger size and worse quality than png?
Or they could just compression for their PNGs. PNG is a lossless format so they’ll only lose a fraction of a second during creation.
I use 4k because I like seeing a lot of stuff at the same time in good quality.
I make screenshots of my whole screen to share all the stuff in the highest detail.
Using jpeg would result in literally unreadable pictures.Depends on the Quality setting and version of jpeg. Even the original jpeg, on high quality, will result in little to no data loss. IIRC, Jpeg can even do lossless, with the only caveat being that it doesn’t save alpha channels (but screenshots don’t need to have transparency, anyway). Newer versions of jpeg, such as jpeg-2000 (and the much less broadly supported jpeg-XL) have much better compression and provide higher image quality at lower file size.
“jpegification” or “Deep-frying” only really occurs with the original jpeg at low quality settings.
They increased to 25 to encourage media uploads to train their own models with. They now have collected enough metrics to realize, most valuable content is below 10MB. Now they are optimizing. They won’t lose anything valuable to them and the users who are impacted might even buy Nitro now. Win-win for them
It would be legally stupid for them to abuse that.
https://discord.com/terms#5 is pretty permissive
Your content is yours, but you give us a license to it when you use Discord. Your content may be protected by certain intellectual property rights. We don’t own those. But by using our services, you grant us a license—which is a form of permission—to do the following with your content, in accordance with applicable legal requirements, in connection with operating, developing, and improving our services:
Use, copy, store, distribute, and communicate your content in manners consistent with your use of the services. (For example, so we can store and display your content.) Publish, publicly perform, or publicly display your content if you’ve chosen to make it visible to others. (For example, so we can display your messages if you post them in certain servers or recommend that content to others.) Monitor, modify, translate, and reformat your content. (For example, so we can resize an image you post to fit on a mobile device.) Sublicense your content, to allow our services to work as intended. (For example, so we can store your content with our cloud service providers.)
I’m surprised they aren’t offsetting the cost by selling all our data to language learning models like everyone else is
aren’t they doing it? but at least by looking at how much they like locking out people until they give out their phone number, I suspect they are not collecting it without having further use for it
Wait, I ~never was notified that it got to 25mb, I thought it was 8
It might have only even been like six months. It was in the little change log pop up during one of the updates at some point
I’m surprised they didn’t put a time limit on the storage since they are not a file hosting platform.
Honestly, I’ve always been surprised they allow any direct file transfers, instead of having to use external links.
I find it weird that they upload content to their own servers even when you provide them with an external link.
Clicking an external link exposes your IP address to the server. All someone has to do is send a link that looks like something you want but actually just logs your ip address and you’re doxxed.
Lol, I already saw that happening in a server
They want the data
I know there’s been several news items regarding file changes to links within discord, like Link Expiration, file size increase for free users, and all i found from a quick search was this reddit post talking about how their file wasnt deleted, but the link directs to discord saying “This content is no longer available.”
I don’t know how long it is, but to wether or not it was removed by discord, or file expired, im not sure
I thought they did that at the start of the year
