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Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

this.alicorn.gay

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Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#51

Post by _a9 »

koolba wrote: post #26
aquova wrote: post #19

> if you haven’t noticed, copying a link for a file now appends special parameters to the end. these are a request signature, which indicates a specific request for that file. this request will expires after a few hours, so files will no longer be permanently available through a specific url. I went and looked at some Discord image URLs, and sure enough there are now "ex", "is" and "hm" fields. While I'm sure removin…

Except it’s the same memes over and over again so if there’s even the simplest deduplication their storage costs would be orders of magnitude less. How many new images are actually uploaded daily? It has to be tiny compared to the same reaction gifs used over and over again.

Aside from the people that abuse the service to host files (using free accounts or using accounts with sniped nitro) there are a lot of bots that do image/gif generation that upload directly as attachments. You could see people using multiple commands, while generating multiple gifs, until they get one they want to save. Theres also servers like Midjourney. I imagine a lot of what Discord stores is dead files that will never be accessed after the first time.

Another note is that a lot of the meme gifs that are used come from the Tenor and Giphy integration which are only temporarily hosted on Discord's media proxy unless a user downloads it and reuploads it.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#52

Post by Gormo »

ehnto wrote: post #8
aeturnum wrote: post #4

It is absolutely wild to me that Discord put up with this at all - but it's not surprising that they would want to change this. It also makes me wonder if Discord could add permanent image hosting to their list of Nitro benefits. I do think they're in prime position to become a service hub for the Very Online but not very technical.

I agree and hadn't really considered the Very Online but not technical as a cohort before. Perhaps in contrast to people who are online but not "online natives". Discord has become a defacto platform for online native communities, in the same way many of us treated IRC. It's really the same atmosphere, any of you old nerds yearning for the IRC golden years should try and find a discord server to join.

Or just stick with IRC and avoid Discord entirely.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#53

Post by Gormo »

burnished wrote: post #34
tmpX7dMeXU wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an ex heavy IRC user, I couldn’t possibly disagree more with this. Not even for the same “free! libre!” reasons as the other replier. It is just at its core still a gamer chat platform heavily misappropriated for other purposes, with a UX that will spare no opportunity to make you aware of that.

How do you reckon? For contrast I've gotten a lot of use out of it for connecting with various topic focused communities and I've seen people do neat things with it. The python server manages to offer an awful lot of surprisingly high quality tutoring, all things considered, and a big part of it is through the automation they've built in via bots. Oh! And I found a server focused on electronics when I was looking for…

> f you want to start using IRC as a newb today you first have to pay obeisance and perform the ritual stumbling through

Nah, web-based clients like The Lounge (https://thelounge.chat/) or Convos (https://convos.chat/) provide a very similar user experience to Discord or Slack.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#54

Post by drewtato »

koolba wrote: post #26
aquova wrote: post #19

> if you haven’t noticed, copying a link for a file now appends special parameters to the end. these are a request signature, which indicates a specific request for that file. this request will expires after a few hours, so files will no longer be permanently available through a specific url. I went and looked at some Discord image URLs, and sure enough there are now "ex", "is" and "hm" fields. While I'm sure removin…

Except it’s the same memes over and over again so if there’s even the simplest deduplication their storage costs would be orders of magnitude less. How many new images are actually uploaded daily? It has to be tiny compared to the same reaction gifs used over and over again.

The reaction gifs specifically (from the gif picker) are hosted by Tenor. But surely they're deduplicating the other images already. I've never seen any evidence either way.

Making temporary URLs would still help whether they're deduplicating or not. And almost certainly they're spending most of the storage on videos that have only been uploaded once. It takes a lot of 100KB images to equal a 50MB video.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#55

Post by hunter2_ »

kr0bat wrote: post #27

How many major social media sites try to prevent this behavior? Facebook links expire[1]; but Reddit, Tumblr, and Twitter all generate seemingly permanent image links. Also semi-related fun fact, I think most sites lack authorization checks when accessing images via direct urls. A logged out user can follow direct image links from private accounts/servers/subs on all these sites, including Discord. Not like that mean…

> A logged out user can follow direct image links from private accounts/servers/subs on all these sites, including Discord. Not like that means much of anything security wise (if you have the url you likely had access to the image)

This is a concept I think about often. Tons of services use unguessable URLs for access control. A long time ago, I would've called it "security by obscurity" but it's become so normalized that I've come to mostly agree that it's sufficient because users who give out the URL can generally perceive it as equivalent to giving out any other secret (such as a password). But on the other hand, using other HTTP headers instead of the URL (authorization headers, cookie headers, etc.) do have a rather major benefit: not typically being stored in logs as cleartext, which cannot generally be said for URLs. So if you run a service that uses URLs as secrets, and you don't keep those URLs in your logs, then it's pretty decent security, I think. Although if your logs fall into the hands of a bad actor, then the actual data probably did as well, so it's kind of moot.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#56

Post by drewtato »

_a9 wrote: post #51
koolba wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it’s the same memes over and over again so if there’s even the simplest deduplication their storage costs would be orders of magnitude less. How many new images are actually uploaded daily? It has to be tiny compared to the same reaction gifs used over and over again.

Aside from the people that abuse the service to host files (using free accounts or using accounts with sniped nitro) there are a lot of bots that do image/gif generation that upload directly as attachments. You could see people using multiple commands, while generating multiple gifs, until they get one they want to save. Theres also servers like Midjourney. I imagine a lot of what Discord stores is dead files that wi…

They're not even temporarily on Discord. They're straight from Tenor.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#57

Post by l33t7332273 »

stevenpetryk wrote: post #46
geraldwhen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guy is gender neutral, like person. It is a noun, not a pronoun. “Dude” is also gender neutral, to save you a post at a later date.

Oh come on. Guy is sometimes gender neutral, but is overwhelmingly often not.

I would say “guys” is gender neutral but “guy” generally isn’t.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#59

Post by e63f67dd-065b »

prophesi wrote: post #43
personjerry wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

why would being on IRC be synonymous with any of that? maybe people on IRC just want to hang out and chat with people?

This is a very contentious topic but looking into the relatively recent Freenode vs Librem.chat debacle I think signifies how important privacy is to the common IRC user.

I don't think that's the right conclusion to draw at all from the Freenode debacle. A pretty significant amount of the channels stayed on Freenode after Andrew's takeover, until Andrew kicked them off himself with the mass Libera purge. There were many communities still on a wait-and-see approach -- at least until Andrew was revealed to be semi-insane (Emperor of Korea, digital territory, alt-right conspiracies, etc).

Yes, the open source privacy crowd is a big chunk, but there were just as many social communities. Don't you remember the olden days of sex channels and all their drama? The roleplay, alt history, sci-fi, and just general random niche hobbies that populated the IRC landscape. IRC was, above all, a social space, it just so happens that many of these communities died or migrated to discord over time. Those that remain are those who are most attached to privacy/open source/etc, all the rest are gone.

Re: Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year

#60

Post by hunter2_ »

stevenpetryk wrote: post #46
geraldwhen wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Guy is gender neutral, like person. It is a noun, not a pronoun. “Dude” is also gender neutral, to save you a post at a later date.

Oh come on. Guy is sometimes gender neutral, but is overwhelmingly often not.

I don't mean to derail this tangent, but I noticed your profile. End of year is when this changes?
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