This was because Skype’s file transfer was Peer-to-peer, so it wasn’t Skype itself hosting the files. While discord is actually hosting the files, which is much more costly.
Well discord could offer P2P option with no limit…
But then they can’t force you to get Discord Nitro.
This could be a nitro feature though
I’m guessing they don’t do it because it would take about 5min before people have written filesharing bots like the IRC XDCC bots of old.
That’s a great idea for Nitro Plus!
- Executive somewhere, probably.
But discord supports sending messages to people who are offline. It kind of breaks the paradigm if certain features require full synchronous communication. Maybe supporting p2p transfers during a video / voice chat would work though.
You say it as if not allowing people to send large files at all is somehow better than only allowing it sometimes.
It kind of breaks the paradigm if certain features require full synchronous communication.
you mean like voice/video chat?
Actually yeah. It feels like voice / videos were kind of tacked on. There isn’t a really good web based chat tool that doesn’t require some sign in and configuration. File transfer isn’t like that and people can easily drop links to third party services in any chat.
Yeah but then no nitro no money no servers for chatting no discord discord ded :/
That sounds like a potential security risk.
Still bullshit 18 years later.
You can set up your own FTP server if you really care.
Wish Discord would implement that for direct messages at least.
P2P vs hosting…
Right, so many sites try their hardest to have every thing hosted on their own platform, then they put stupid High restrictions on what you can actually do with the content because of the fact that they’re now having everything on their own host. Switching from peer to peer to Cloud hosted was in my opinion the beginning of the downfall for Skype. It removed a lot of its permissions that you could give on the platform, it broke compatibility of the Unix Community which took them two and a half years to finally fix, and it actually butchered their reliability
Fusion 360: we have unnecessarily decided to force you to use the cloud for this product
Also Fusion 360: *Noooo all you free users are using up too much of our server space, you will have to pay.
Here is an idea, let me run it on my PC and it won’t use any of your servers
laughs in telegram
Gotta use a zero-knowledge VPN for all P2P transfers.
Check out croc.
skype probably didn’t save a copy of all your files forever, discord has to save a copy for the government!
Original Skype was mine blowing at the time because it was able to send files peer to peer even when people were behind firewalls. Peer to peer file transfers were the norm at the time, but when both parties were behind firewall file transfers wouldn’t work, obviously. Skype used different hacks like UDP punch to establish P2P connection and if everything failed then it would fall back to proxying.
Skype was wild with how aggressively it tried to create a direct connection. I love it for its tenacity but it would do things like open up listening sockets on common server ports (so it would conflict with e.g. a webserver) which drove me nuts at the time
Haha, yeah! Going to settings and changing ports was always the first thing to do after installing Skype.
How is udp a hack?
UDP hole punching could be regarded as a clever “hack”
UDP punching is a hack.
Skype was mostly p2p so it enabled a lot more free functionality. Discord runs everything through its servers.
Almost as though it would be better if it didn’t
Pros and cons.
The experience is way more consistent in a centralized service. In Skype, sometimes your messages took ages to send and the call quality was horrible.
In turn, on a centralized service, they have limits, monetization, and they can sell your data.
P2P exposes your IP to those you need to connect to. So if you’re a streamer or something - share a file and you dox yourself. It also means if you’re offline you can’t send the file.
It’s just not practical over remotely hosted for it to be the default. There’s other apps you can download if you still want to use P2P
That’s the main reason I left Skype. Giving someone even your username and simply answering their call would expose your IP and be a major security liability.
“Hello, File Seller, I am going into uploading and need your strongest files”. “My files are too powerful for you, traveller”.
You cannot handle my files traveller!
This is the reason I’ve never used discord outside voice chatting with friends a few times per month.
A basic photo from my phone is over the file size limit. It’s essentially unusable, and I’m not going to get me and my friends and family to all pay a subscription for a feature literally every other chat app provides for free. Sorry.
A basic photo from my phone is over the file size limit. It’s essentially unusable
For a while this was a problem, but now Discord just auto-compresses photos over 8MB. Obviously this isn’t ideal if you want to actually share the full-size image, but for most use-cases a compressed photo is fine. Almost every other chat app is also compressing your images, it just isn’t telling you it’s doing it outright.
When did they start this? Because I last tried a few months ago to send a photo and it was telling me it was too large, and to buy nitro. It was ~8.6MB
Years ago, as far as I can tell. Are you using an older version of the app maybe? I’ve not had Discord outright refuse to send pictures for ~2 years now, for a while it would ask to compress them, now it’ll just automatically compress them (unless it’s so big it can’t of course).
Back in April they also increased the limit to 25MB, so even less stuff should need to get compressed anyway.
I believe it doesn’t always work for whatever reason. I had images from my phone get the ‘over 8mb’ message sometimes only a few months ago as well, sometimes it worked but other times it didn’t
Maybe he send the full file and not just the photo via the photo option.
Only the phone apps auto-compress, the desktop and Web versions do not.
Discord’s monetary scheme is so backwards. Pay to be able to upload a file greater than 8 MB… up to 100 MB. Pay to be able to upload and use animated emojis, pay to be able to use emojis from other channels. These are not features worth paying for.
What would you suggest Discords monetization system be instead?
A loooot of people seem to completely disagree considering how many people pay for nitro even after they removed discriminators (and the ability to change them with nitro).
I have supported Discord with a nitro subscription for as long as I’ve had an account. It’s a terrific program and there’s no reason to expect premium features for nothing in return. The mentality that everything should be free is why we have so many fucking ad driven online business models and I’m over it. I pay for what I use if it’s a good service.
it’s amazing that you’ve been downvoted for saying you pay for a service you use that’s not ad-riddled junk. how else do people expect these entities to make money that pays for servers, employees, etc.? someone operates the hardware and it’s not free.
That’s the same reason I do. A place for friends to hang out online free from ads and algorithms manipulating the conversation is such a rarity these days. All the features they give you for free are nice enough I don’t mind tossing them a few bucks for a theme and an animated avatar hat. Hopefully if enough of us do, we can avoid the enshittening.
That 8mb limit was annoying though. Glad they raised it.
A photo shouldn’t be over 2 MB either. Compress them.
Compression ruins good photos.
Do I look like I know what a jpg is?
Goddamn 🌭
I fully expect Discord to pull a spez sometime in the future. Probably not as destructive and blatantly anti user as that asshole, but bad nonetheless. Gotta remember that even if it’s already self-sustainable with the current nitros, investors want ROI and they want it NOW.
I hate discord now. It’s worse than reddit
They also went to the deep end trying to make profits. Discord has a bloated interface and tries to shove their subscription up your face every chance they can.
Try my ad block list: https://github.com/synthead/discord-adfree
Couldn’t agree more 👍
It’s also not a forum
That’s an astute observation Watson. Hur dur
I only had to read two of your comments to know I never want to read another one again.
Time to look for that block user option.
Two is all it takes for you, huh.
I look at it like this: I’ve seen, heard and read enough shit in my 48 years to know when I’m better off without certain types of people. So I block them. I’ll never have to read a comment and see that username again and go, “oh, this fucker again… ugh”
In no way do I suffer from this approach and lose out on some enlightenment or critical information.its a win, win.
Worst case scenario is I blocked a decent person, but I’ll never know and it still won’t make my life any less fulfilling.
And for the record, I dont spend my days blocking people. Maybe four to six people a month (on Reddit), probably far less here, because most users seem decently grounded in comparison, with far less emotional issues.
But fuck yeah, I do love the block function when someone gives me that bad energy moment. It’s liberating.
You speak true, I can agree to this outlook.
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Honestly, not having ads and being very usable for free, Discord is still pretty good IMO
Not having ads? Lmao what? It literally spams you to buy nitro every chance it gets & it’s not exactly free- they harvest quite literally every single drop of information they possibly can about you.
Huh, I haven’t heard about Discord harvesting data yet. Got something specific to read about that?
Bro… look in the settings, they literally give you a button to request your collected data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHTR0-_eHto , here’s a video about it if you really need it.
So, basically, payment information and analytics, the latter of which you can disable. Everything else is the data that Discord is meant to store (as in messages, settings, all the other stuff I expect it to display back to me in the app). I mean, it could store less, but overall it doesn’t seem that bad?
If you boil down every single aspect of information they possibly can gather on you to “analytics”- sure, however Discord got rid of the functionality to disable analytic data collection years ago iirc, and the button to ‘delete my information’ was removed around the same time- and replaced with the ‘request my data’ button.
But you should also know if you install it, it’s been claimed (I’m too lazy to look it up, I just know that I’ve read/watched a video about it years ago) that it collects data on what you do across your entire pc, to at least the same extent that microsoft’s default telemetry does. This is due to them monitoring your pc at all times so it can integrate with whatever game you are playing- of course.
Discord app is same level of shit like reddit app and has no third party clients(they too fucks api)
Still there is a mod called aliucord
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Bro fuck discord
Honest question: how come?
Because is proprietary and they’ve been making bad decisions like removing discriminators. Try out https://revolt.chat or https://matrix.org instead.
Dont forget they also harvest quite literally every single piece of data they possibly can about you- and if you install their app they collect information on everything else happening on your pc as well.
Oh and the admins have been exposed as groomers and their platform is absolutely infested with pedophiles in general.
That’s like… any platform ever tho?
I was going to ask “every platform is run by groomers and is infested by pedos?” but then I realized how close to true it is…
No sense in fighting the ‘everyone collects and sells your data’ point however, considering yes- they all do, but some do far far more harvesting than others…
The thing that did it for me was the updated privacy policy scandal about how they could now store all the contents of voice recordings. Now they know exactly where I live, how much I make, everything. Never paying for Nitro again, and my activity there plummeted.
Why is everyone celebrating that companies are starting to keep voice recordings and chat records of users? It is mad.
I’ve been using https://wormhole.app/ for file transfers over discord/text. The link is only good for 24 hours, but it supports up to 10 gb files.
I like swisstransfer, it allows up to 50gb
Legend. I’ll check it out 🥵
I’ve been using WeTransfer. They hold the files for a week, but it’s only 2GB max if I recall. I’ll have to check out Wormhole now. Thanks for the FYI!
How is this sustainable for the people hosting this? This almost seems too good to be true.
Well, how much content is anyone gonna upload just for 24h? Unless DDoS is the goal.
Well, if only a thousand max-sized files get uploaded in one day (from people using it), that’s 10 terrabytes of storage needed. It’s very generous to run this for free (considering the power and bandwidth required for such a service).
Bandwidth isn’t a concern if you get an unmetered line, and 10TB storage is only about $250. I would imagine they make decent money from tech, and find the service very convenient personally.
Bandwidth is very much a concern, I’ll think they of course have multiple 1Gb/s and 10Gb/s NICs however those can also be capped if too many people download the files at the same time. I’ve had a small file hosting service and it capped out my 1Gb/s connection pretty easily after a while. Had to upgrade on 10Gb NICs and it still overloaded them after a few weeks, now who is going to pay for that even if the bandwidth is unmetered.
Iirc it uses webtorrent, which is a torrent protocol that runs in-browser for the most part.
Small file live on their servers using end-to-end encryption for the 24 hours.
Larger files are treated as a peer-to-peer torrent, which means that the tab needs to stay open until your downloadees are done grabbing it.
That webtorrent solution sounds awesome if that’s the case
The fucking bane of my existence I swear, all my homies hate filesize limits.
Fortunately we have a few options, some better than others, and if it helps one person Imma talk about it now.
Magic-wormhole: My favorite, CLI client that shares files from your computer to a server to be downloaded with a password you send through your normal means of communication. No filesize limit, files stay on the server for 1h unless downloaded (deleted after download.) For sensitive information I would PGP it before I upload but I have trust issues.
Warp: Magic wormhole, but GUI. Second favorite, only because I love my terminal so much. It’s literally just a GUI wrapper for magic wormhole though so no complaints from me. Works on windows too iirc, and the android wrapper for it is called just “wormhole” alone, no “magic.”
Onionshare: Sends files directly from your pc to theirs, works through Tor. I have gotten it to work before, but sometimes it hates me and refuses to connect, usually when I try to DL from mobile.
Soulseek: Not exactly private, but it works if you can forward a port. If you need privacy you’ll have to mark the files as private, probably name them something nondescript like “file1,” and set it so only your trusted buddies can download it, then whitelist the buddy you want to share it with for that time (would have to remove trust for buddies by default, only enabling the ones for the current file to be shared, then swap that again next time. Like I said it “works” but it’s far from ideal. Would also PGP them files to be safe.)
Torrents: well we all know this one, it’s the classic!
I’m probably forgetting some/don’t know some, so anyone else feel free to add!
The classic would probably be plain old FTP, but SFTP/SCP/SSH works fine as well.
When I need to share files to newbs I usually just use a small Node script to host an HTTPS server from terminal, and give them a file link
I remember being shown FTP back in high school and finding any reason at all to use it, in spite of the fact there were better alternatives for my friends to access certain files, especially considering I probably got the shit of Kazaa anyway. But we FTP’d, and it was slow most of the time, or slower than any of the shares, but it felt good.
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I sometimes use Element. Can confirm, it’s pretty good. I wish more people would give it a try.
Matrix with a WhatsApp bridge is the way to go. I’ve had it since over a year, and it works like a charm.
How does this work?
an android emulator has whatsapp and matrix bridge set up, bridge reads it, and then the bridge sends you the whatsapp message to your matrix front end client(element or whatever) official documentation https://matrix.org/blog/2019/02/26/bridging-matrix-with-whatsapp-running-on-a-vm/
Thank you :) That looks really interesting
You need to host your own server and then install the software for the bridge.
I think it was this one https://github.com/mautrix/whatsapp but no guarantees
Yes! Just downloaded a client for it and can’t wait to try it!
Just waiting for them to add proper audio call support, and I’ll convince even my mom to switch
Back in 2010 my best friend at the time sent me an entire pirated copy of need for speed most wanted in a zip file through Skype. It took the entire day for it to send and then it took my weak ass computer until I woke up the next morning to unzip the folder the game was on. I remember waking up and being overjoyed that it was at 97% completion. I only had to wait another few minutes for it to finish.
I still have that exe to this day. It’s basically impossible to play the game otherwise. I actually store the exe on my phone since it has so much storage and it’s easy to move it over thanks to USB 3.0 and higher. I do that with a lot of games actually.
It’s basically impossible to play the game otherwise.
I remember having to install Need for Speed Carbon on a dual-boot of Windows 7 in order to play it on Windows 10 iirc because 10 made a change that broke a certain DRM and I couldn’t install from disc. I assume it’s similar for Most Wanted?
The last time I tried to use a disk to install a nfs game was on a windows 8 laptop and it didn’t want to launch unless I did compatibility for XP and it didn’t end up installing the game anyways.
I mean it’s basically impossible to play the game otherwise because EA refuses to sell the black box need for speed games, and the only other way to legally obtain them is to buy a 20 year old dvd which didn’t sell very well to begin with. Even if I did that, I wouldn’t be able to install it because I haven’t had a PC or laptop with a disk drive in almost 8 years.
Since EA doesn’t want my money, I won’t feel bad about not giving it to them. Need for Speed Hot Pursuit, Hot Pursuit 2, Underground, Underground 2, Most Wanted, Carbon, are all abandonware. Too much copyrighted music and car licences for EA to even consider touching it so feel free to pirate the games.
Recently I wanted to transfer one 20GB file to my brother and I ended up using FileZilla.
But before that I tried some quick effortless solutions (like opening Skype/Teams and using that) and I failed.
I miss opening the IM app and quickly transfer something.
Check out croc, a slick little tool to allow you to send files from one computer to another. No port forwarding, encryption built in.
That’s a really interesting project.
As I paged through the documents, I couldn’t find how long nor where files are stored during transfer. It kinda seems like they get stored (in encrypted form) in the guy’s closet server.
Don’t suppose you can speak to this?
Reading through the code, you can start your own relay server. The relay server code should be part of the repo then.
If the files are E2E encrypted, I assume they are useless to the person that is hosting the server.
(Disclaimer, I’ve not reviewed the code, don’t quote)
Files can be transferred via P2P connection without them being uploaded first to a third location. I assume though that some sort of server serves as a matchmaker allowing two computers find each other when the connection is established
That’s exactly what the relay server is, it just relays communication details. And you can run your own relay server if you don’t want to use his public relay server.
Y’all don’t pass CDs around anymore?
You stopped using floppy?
I graduated to 100MB ZIP Disks.
Smh, kids these days. Clay tablets are superior!
I want to see your clay tablet when it rains young man. We drew on walls in a cave and then told the other one to go there.
But cave sharing is not private. Once it’s in the cave, it’s there forever. Do you want some scientist to study your nudes 10,000 years from now?
You can burn them, but you can’t reuse them afterwards
