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

As a forum-like community like Reddit it was always shit to begin with.

Was looking into some FOSS tools, the ones that say discord I automatically skip, imo it’s not future proof.

Honestly, I've always been surprised they allow any direct file transfers, instead of having to use external links.

I thought they did that at the start of the year

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

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.

I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.

It’s a real issue. It’s amazing they allow it like it is now.

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

And standard screenshots of my desktop are ~30mb, I was lucky to upload it lol

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

"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.

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

Wait, I ~never was notified that it got to 25mb, I thought it was 8

Sure it's getting cheaper, but is it getting cheaper faster than their need for it?

I've always expected their business model was unsustainable probably only able to manage through venture capital and growth.

There's hardly even any competition, their free product is substantial. Even fully funding a server is barely enough to cover a bare metal node.

This is just the introduction to cost savings. As they wade into market saturation, and still need to provide growth in numbers they'll need to pinch the free users into paying and pinch the paying users into paying enough to fully fund the service. Of course it won't stop there...

Edit: FFS dictation can't 'their' it's way out of a wet paper bag.

Yes but are your storage Managers doing anything? Going on long lunches and racking up bar tabs? Expensing escorts?

Until a viable alternative is presented, I doubt Discord will die anytime soon. Part of the problem is people have a hard time accepting that even if you make the best meal in town, you've gotta get people to step inside before they'll try it. To an extent, this does involve winning a popularity contest of sorts if you want Discord to die.

I think often times folks are torn between enjoying a space/app as is, and making compromises to attract a larger group. IMO Linux has the same issue and that's part of why die hard fanboys get so aggressively defensive when this is brought up.

It's the software equivalent of being the bitter "nice guy" that simultaneously wants to attract a girlfriend (users) but is kind of an asshole to women. You might think you don't stink but please wear deodorant.

What's a good voice-chat alternative then?

revolt might catch up eventually

https://github.com/revoltchat

A smaller size limit on what amounts to free file hosting isn't exactly enshittification. Servers and hard drives aren't free.

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.

My guess is Telegram's being bankrolled by entities that are willing to eat the cost of this kind of data usage.

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.

the free upload limit was only recently bumped to 25mb, it used to be 8mb

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.

https://8mb.video/

^ 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.

Revolt I love, but there's no federation or anything, and I won't be able to get anyone to switch unless they could join many servers from mine

Nah, xmpp is better.

Is there a discord replacement that isn't matrix that does this?