Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”
Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive”
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.
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!
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
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.)
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.
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?
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?
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
I'm sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!
No it's not
Next issue
Nice! They get less free identity data an own less copyright
Removed by author
Good, fuck gen z kiddos
“Storage management is expensive”
It's really not, though.
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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.
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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.