this post was submitted on 07 Sep 2024

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525

Discord lowers free upload limit to 10MB: “Storage management is expensive” (www.dexerto.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

230 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I'm sure there are dozens of you caring about screen share!

[+] [email protected] -14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

“Storage management is expensive”

It's really not, though.

//////

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.

/////

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.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 3 months ago (5 children)

If every one of those users uploads one 10MB file, that would be two petabytes of data. At S3's IA prices that's $25k/month. And people are uploading far, far more data than that.

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

You think they spend 400000 on coffee? You lost me there.

After looking at their number of employees and some math, I could actually see that as plausible.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago

It... Is?

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (14 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 84 points 3 months ago (1 children)

That sounds like a you problem, because a PNG screenshot of my full 5120x1440 desktop is about 850 kB.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (4 children)

Interesting. Mine is 3840x1600 which should be ever so slightly less pixels.

I have noticed the content does matter, is your background native resolution or mostly one color?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (14 children)

The issue is the absence of being able to port forward in a lot of places. UPNP exists on some networks but it's usually disabled. But if we want actual peer to peer we're going to need to implement some way to accept incoming connections EVERYWHERE.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Isn't that what things like wormhole are made to deal with?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Once an end-to-end, encrypted, connection is established between a pair of peers then anything can be sent through it. The establishment proces is generally facilitated by a server of some description so neither peer needs to allow inbound connections. (I'm a long, long way from being an expert on this and happy to be corrected - but this seems like network fundamentals?)