Discord as a filehost will no longer be possible by the end of the year
this.alicorn.gay
this.alicorn.gay
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.
If we're still on IRC then we mostly would clearly have an objection to using discord for the very many legitimate reasons to object to it, such as the mass data collection, phone number requirements for many users, lack of control / selfhosting capability, or just general requirement to use (very heavy) nonlibre software to access it.
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.
> I believe that his intentions are malicious, and that he should under no circumstances gain control over the network, nor access to its user data.
Just from the first "explainer" I remember (https://gist.github.com/joepie91/df80d8d36cd9d1bde46ba018af4...)
Discord is just treated as the sum repository of all for way too many people.
The barrier of entry of asking and answering questions on a Discord is very low. Setting up a forum, that's needs a bit of effort, not to mention hosting, and on-going headache of spam and liability.
I mean, I'm really interested in Audio Description, but there is no forum for discussing the nuts and bolts, issues, research, advocacy etc. Conversely there are AD groups on Twitter, Facebook, Linkd In, Discord and a few more besides.
On IRC of course, you got X amount of history when you logged on, and that was what you worked with. It does feel a lot more ephemeral, more like a real conversation.
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 help repairing a damaged TV that had knowledge resources the likes of which I rarely see anymore.
In all that I never felt like the experience was hampered by discord's association with gaming. Honestly it felt like a chat client that wanted to be used - if you want to start using IRC as a newb today you first have to pay obeisance and perform the ritual stumbling through. Discord doesn't (or did not as of a few years ago) even need an account to get started, just type a handle and go.
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.
> 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
So did/does IRC.
I am mostly talking about the communities themselves, there are not many truly large everyone-in-a-room chat networks with diverse and modern topics. Yeah IRC is still there, but I am in it for the people, and the people are on discord at the moment. They'll probably move when Discord fucks up, but that doesn't change the conversations I have today.
Ruled… and hopefully not returning too soon.
Here is the option though… we ignore the titans above us, the ones that desperately need us. See some of them fall; and hopefully they shrink small enough were we aren’t craning our necks so much.
Or, we continue to pretend that everything is fine and keep praying and sacrificing (printing money) and pretend that will just keep working.
ZIRP was a mistake. Better to rip the bandaid off now.
But… for what it’s worth, I think it will lead to war. Actual war, not this proxy stuff. We’re too far in and owe China too much. There needs to be some debt reset because “paying it off” isn’t a thing.
I am not saying Discord is better, or you should move. More like, if you gave up IRC decades ago, but want to try some new communities, discord chats are close enough to be fun.
I signed up for the trial and hop into a direct call. The other participant shared his screen, and the video looks like hot garbage. High fidelity options buried behind notices that the other user needs Nitro.
If I pay for the service, my UX should improve. It did not. No thanks.
This poses a problem as the amount of shots is quite large... We have a channel where users post their shots, and the bot basically harvests the links of the shots which have a high amount of votes. So currently no re-hosting of images occurs.
I can image tho why Discord does this. Our gallery is likely not visited a lot, but I can imagine high profile files pulled from discord channels like pirated software/malware etc. are a big problem. The route to the server / channel where the files are coming from isn't known, only to discord
- "Copy link" on images is now producing an image link that has "ex", "is" and "hm" URL parameters
- The parameters can be removed (or altered) without affecting the link's validity (at least, for now)
- "ex" means expiry, "is" means issue time. Both are expressed as hexadecimal numbers encoding a UNIX timestamp. "is" is the time when the link is generated. "ex" is exactly 86400 seconds (24 hours) after the issue time.
- "hm" likely means HMAC. It looks like a SHA-256 hash, and is likely an HMAC-SHA-256 of the link, ex and is parameters. It's not currently being validated, but it would not surprise me if Discord is internally tracking failures on hashes and expiry parameters.
TBH I'd always assumed Discord links only worked in Discord. Which sounds like is how things will work, going forward.
I mean, you probably don't go and unplug your modem when you get done with a browsing session right? Or turn off your phone when you aren't actively engaged in a phone call?/writing a text message?
https://www.reddit.com/r/AV1/comments/hb039t/8mib_shrek_is_b...
Also I will give it that it’s a surprising amount of movement for being just 6fps, that file.
Fun experiment, but not really watchable with this much loss of detail :p
(The movies we watched on small iPod screens were surprisingly watchable, thanks to having good audio and image quality in spite of being somewhere around 320x160 px resolution.)
Ours were probably 320x240 too. It was many years ago so I didn’t remember exactly :p
Although, for a widescreen movie it might use less than 240 of the available vertical size. For example if the aspect of the original video is 16:9, then a 320 px wide resized version of the video will be about 180 px tall.
So yeah, my guess is that the screen was 240 tall and that some of the videos we watched on it may have been as little as 180 px tall :D
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 means much of anything security wise (if you have the url you likely had access to the image)
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/30477877/facebook-image-...
They did, and people hosted a bunch of things there, and then they changed the ToS to not allow NSFW stuff.
What happened to all of the NSFW images people hosted on Tumblr?
I assume they were all deleted with the ToS change.
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.
This sucks because it's now not possible to use the browser's built-in image viewer which has better UX.
I am expecting them to eventually put ads on the page as well.
Random example: https://i.redd.it/144knacbw3rb1.jpg
https://www.reddit.com/r/uBlockOrigin/comments/14ks1tm/reddi...
I went and looked at some Discord image URLs, and sure enough there are now "ex", "is" and "hm" fields. While I'm sure removing image hosting would save them a lot of money and trouble, I'm not really seeing anything that necessarily supports their claim though.
How many new images are actually uploaded daily? It has to be tiny compared to the same reaction gifs used over and over again.
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.
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.
What makes the author think something is changing?
It is a noun, not a pronoun. “Dude” is also gender neutral, to save you a post at a later date.
Basically, guys is neutral in those cases where it's used to describe a group that isn't entirely male but otherwise it's male (somewhat circular reasoning, but I can't think of a better way to describe it); guy doesn't usually get that same logic applied.
“THIS GUY, am I right?” - used to mock/express disbelief
“Bro” is also gender neutral, just adding in to this mix.
“Bro don’t play me like that.” “What’s up bro?”
“Dude, you wouldn’t believe what happened to me this weekend” gender ambiguous.
Context is everything.
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/guy
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/guy
https://www.thefreedictionary.com/guy
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/11816/is-guy-gen...
Note that wiktionary points out the fact that the female complement to "guy" is "gal". https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/guy
“Gal” seems derisive. I would assume someone was being berated or otherwise dismissed if being called “gal”. As in, “oh I suppose there are women here that I will address differently”, hence “gal”.
Wonder if there is a regional aspect to it, or perhaps it being an older and less used word has lead to more individual variance in connotations?
It'd be nice if either Discord or Airtable let you give an S3 or R2 bucket URL and you can just pay for hosting yourself, without the file expirations. Doing that makes it a headache for everyone.
I like how Notion handles linked images- they keep the original URL around but also duplicates the file into their own S3; if you serve a website using Notion as a CMS, you can still access the original link — so I've been uploading to my bucket and serving my own hosted files to our Notion docs and Notion-powered sites.
Too bad Discord or Airtable never went down those routes.
They got a community showcase but that's a few stuff only.
This is at least a crude way to stop that and I think it’s a good thing.
At some point it’d probably just be easier to create a service that generates the links on demand and caches them for their TTL. However, generating the links will probably require access to the Discord server where they’re posted.