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.
Does anyone know of a Discord alternative?
Revolt is the only feature-rich swap in option.
Matrix is the closest replacement, and XMPP can replicate some functionality too.
There isn’t a full alternative, but if you just want text chat with some voice chat added on there are options like Matrix.
My vote is for Matrix
I haven’t heard of Matrix but I’ve heard of Revolt.
Matrix any good?
Revolt tries to be a discord clone/replacement and suffer from some of the same issues. Matrix happens to have a lot of feature in common, but is focused on privacy and security at its core.
Matrix is a laggy dumpsterfire. Messages take longer to send in Matrix than they do in Lemmy, and Lemmy isn’t even supposed to be a real-time chat app.
Try Element X if you have a mobile. It’s rebuilt on the new sdk and offers a new architecture that has messages come in way faster than on Element (original)
Did you blindly sign up for matrix.org?
What is the best instance with the largest user base?
Edit: and …yes I did
I don’t know. Why do you want a large user base?
Guessing at one reason:
It feels good to know that you’re not signing up for someone’s instance that they’re just trying out admining for the first time and maybe if they’re too busy to do the proper updates next weekend they’ll just close shop.
(And by shop I mean fantastic free volunteering effort of course!)
Yeah, pick literally any other instance. I went with Mozilla’s, but there are plenty of alternatives. Or host your own!
The first time yeah, but I tried it again on another instance and it was better (at least it didn’t fail to load half the time), but still super slow. The 2nd time is what I was talking about.
It works tho!
Homeserver issue most likely.
I’d be down if Discord offered optional/default compression for images/videos. Yeah naybe my photos are 10 MB each, but with a slight quality loss they can get under 1 MB. Telegram does it well.
Discord offers automatic compression for images uploaded from mobile, but not from desktop IIRC. It’s weird.
No it’s not
Next issue
A feature that’s be nice is giving you a higher upload limit if you make your upload temporary.
Or let you host from your own machine, rather than paying Discord for the privilege of using their wildly overpriced services.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link, prevents you from getting hammered with download requests if your upload becomes popular, and allows your content to be accessed when your own machine goes to sleep or has any kind of networking interruption.
Before discord people used to self host teamspeak or some other software. One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine, because they don’t know where you are.
Hosting the image on discords CDN allows you not to give out your IP address to any person that comes across the link
You don’t need the whole image, just the route to your machine to retrieve the data. Glorified Bit.ly.
One of the big things you don’t have to think about is the person you just made a joke about or beat in an online game trying to DDOS your machine
Definitely a perk of a bulk centralized system. But the pricing model is still messed up. If Teamspeak sold you gems to buy widgets to mask your IP, I still wouldn’t pay for the service.
I hate discord a lot, but this feature kinda destroys the reason discord exists. We used to have irc which is direct communication and needs both systems to be online ( yes, bouncers exist, but they arent perfect ). We moved away from irc so systems didnt need to be online and it was all in the cloud. Direct communication/file sharing from pc would kinda revert all that lol
( lets gooooo, bring irc back :p )
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
on mobile it’s just a huge pile of stinky shit anyway
*everywhere
Just use signal or any e2e instant messanger instead of it.
It was a matter of time honestly
As long as cattle keeps using these white products, there will always be a merchant to sell their data.
We clearly have poorly educated population that can’t be bothered with anything besides blind consumption of whatever is trendy.
Plastic clothes, goyslop and data harvesting apps is essentially the condition of the modern wage slave and they appear to be satisfied.
I think I found Trump’s Speech Writer’s account.
If Trump started saying this shit, he would get re elected
But you don’t appear to have sufficient understanding of what I said, if you believe somebody like Trump would repeat this in public lol
Oh. no, I’m not saying that this is something that Trump would say, it just has all the cadence of someone with early onset dementia. It is written like how he speaks, thus “Trump’s Speech Writer” and not Trump himself.
the sly antisemitism was totally on brand for Trump as well.
“sly antisemitism”?
Lol, what?
Y’all gonna accuse them of being a Chinese Hamas member next?
You can fuck right off, too. The evidence is clear as day.
I dunno, that was at least coherent if not incredibly dumb.
goyslop
You gotta be fucking kidding me with this antisemitic shit.
It makes me happy that I don’t even know what that means. Well, I didn’t until now.
High schooler Reading comprehension spotted.
Melt down about one term that you didn’t like and ignore the message lol
Either way my content speak for itsel, you could first do some basic diligence before spazzing out and trying to imply intent that ain’t there.
We really so deserve the government we got with this genius
Rheee
Sorry bro, you’re the one unironically using antisemitic dogwhistles, as if you can’t get the same point across without them.
That is your opinion and your entitled to express yourself here but learn to read lol
your
Somebody needs to get up on their high school education and it’s not the person you’re talking to.
lol
Pretty funny from someone who could learn to learn to write better and maybe describe things without needing to lean on antisemitic dogwhitles, but I mean, you obviously think you won this argument, so whatever. I’m sure your arguments about why it’s really important to use the N-word to explain your points have just about as much substance.
I recommend reporting the comment
Definitely not the kind of shit that should be welcome in this community
Also (after looking it up) I’m pretty sure that “goy” is a term used by jewish people to refer to non-jewish people. So in this case I think they’re saying that it is “non-jewish trash” by referring to it as “goyslop”.
I could be wrong though, they’re pretty incoherent and it’s definitely not the kind of comment reply I wanted to see when I woke up from my nap.
Yeah, already reported it.
And yeah, “goyim” is anyone non-Jewish, so the implication is Jews control the world and they only give out the barest minimum of sustenance to goyim known as “goyslop.”
Like the amount of time and energy people put into these fucking slurs is ridiculous.
Ah gotcha
On a related tangent, I think my least favorite thing about my instance is that I only see the upvotes for that terrible comment. Which it has entirely too many of.
Honestly the amount of terrible comments and posts like that I see makes me want to switch to an instance with downvotes so that I can see that such shot isn’t popular.
If it brings you any solace, Mr Raised-by-4chan is getting absolutely thundercunted with downvotes.
Haven’t seen that many in a long while.
Happy to hear it, and also happy to see their comment disappear
I’ve never heard this word in my life and I somehow knew it was antisemitic?
just googled it
it’s apparently a conspiracy that jews feed non-jews (goys) something called goyslop that makes them submissive / slaves
absolutely bonkers
I didn’t know that, I assumed it was a corruption of “gay slop”
The “goy” is the giveaway. I had to google it to be sure, but seriously, what the fuck?
This is one of those things where the concept is entirely appropriate and accurate, except for that one minor issue…
Except it’s not the Jews, it’s the WASPs and whatever weird Catholic sect/cult that Justice Barret was raised in…okay, and yes, there’s probably some Jews in the mix as well.
Because what I just described is the main demographic groups of the .01%
Nah, they call them “white apps” and so since they are coming from a place of racism against whites, they feel it’s totally appropriate and okay to use a term like goyslop. It’s a shitty word to use and claiming it’s okay because you are actually racist against whites is stupid as fuck. That is still using antisemitic dog whistles. There are other ways to describe the same concept like “fast food slop.”
They think other people can’t read and don’t realize it still makes them a stupid racist.
But the concept isn’t just about fast food, it’s about the system that produces pink slime based chicken nuggets, and the people who sit up top of that system.
So they’ve correctly identified systemic problems that hurt people, and that those actions are done with intent, either maliciously or with indifference.
They’ve just confused capitalism working as intended, as being a Jewish conspiracy.
Also, “white apps” is just really bad racial propaganda. Whoever coined that term needs some new blood in their marketing team.
Here we see the Common Incel in his natural habitat, trolling for reactions in his perpetually online state of being. Nature.
Proper Nomanclature is “wage slave”
Thank you :)
You mean auto deleting?
Good, fuck gen z kiddos
Mine changed back to 8MB from 25MB a few weeks ago and it really does cut the about of stuff you can send without having to run them through compression or just host externally.
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.
Anything that wants to meaningfully compete with Discord will probably also need to be able to near-seamlessly port over existing Discord servers to the new platform, since it’s so established now. Is there a competitor that can do that?
Is there a competitor that can do that?
I say this with all due respect: Who gives a shit? If you were foolish enough to dump your entire community into Discord alone and don’t have an off-ramp, that’s your own fucking problem.
Who gives a shit? The people who use it that you apparently want to switch to something else, for one. Shouldn’t it be easy to switch, like going from Chrome to Firefox? That’s how we get out of Discord hell.
Shouldn’t it be easy to switch, like going from Chrome to Firefox?
Say you have no idea how any of this works without saying you have no idea how any of this works.
That’s how we get out of Discord hell.
Why is it our job to fix the problems of a private, profit-focused company?
We’re not fixing Discord’s problems, oh my god. We’re trying to get their existing users to go somewhere else even though it’s what’s familiar and Discord works for them.
Also it’s definitely possible to code an import tool that scrapes a given server for info on how to structure things on the new platform, so idk what you think you’re gaining by insulting my comparison to an aspect of a service that makes users motivated to switch.
I don’t know who shat in your coffee, but get a fucking new cup.
Honestly the onboarding for a lot of alternatives to various to popular platforms/apps (Matrix, Mastodon, etc) seems to be the biggest impediment to more adoption of those platforms and apps.
By onboarding here I mean the communities that use those platforms recruiting others to join them and help build communities up.
Like goddamn if that users comment was the first time I’d heard of Matrix it would have turned me away for sure.
Not to mention Mastodon having a reputation that proceeds it.
Yes, exactly! At this point, some of these communities have been on Discord for years and have specialized bots for certain tasks. They don’t want to start over, and I don’t want them to either - there’s tons of real work that these communities have put in. I think that these messaging services that want to make headway in the space Discord occupies need to reduce the friction in switching because a lot of Discord admins do believe that the feature set is better, they just can’t easily move over.
This happens to organizations all the time and it’s a known issue - Discord communities are no different. I’m hoping something comes along in the next few years if it doesn’t already exist in its infancy right now. Even at the user level, I know many people are confused about Matrix. I don’t know how exactly to fix these issues, but they need to be priorities.
I’m completely out of the loop, so I might as well ask you: where is discord so established? Never used it in my life. I used IRC, ICQ and MSN in their time. Now for work Slack, teams and zoom. Signal and Telegram privately. Email for everything.
What am I missing? What does discord provide?
Every single small game I play has effectively the entirety of their support, community and forums run through discord. Instead of easy to search and discover forums, I have to use crappy infinite chat logs. It sucks.
Unfortunately, a lot of fandom communities, video games, and (ugh) hobbyist development projects have Discard servers instead of a forum or similar.
It provides a weird IRC-but-not-really type experience that is similar to MSN in some ways. A lot of younger people flock to it because they find computer stuff difficult and they just want it to work, be easy, and have an app. The UI is trendy even though it’s horrible to actually navigate due to all the wasted space and buttons.
I really just think it caught on at the right time, though the video calling is pretty good. What I have a problem with is that you need to join a server to access any information inside of it, so it’s not searchable from outside of the Discord ecosystem. For dev projects or large communities, that sucks and makes the internet a worse place.
Personally I originally went to Discord because it was the alternative to skype which was increasingly becoming shittier and shittier when Microsoft bought it.
Yes, that’s how I ended up there too. At the time, Skype sucked and Mumble/Ventrilo/etc. were seen as too old-school for my friends (and a lot of them didn’t have PCs, just smartphones). We also tried Google Meet, Zoom, and Facebook Messenger at various points but Discord always seemed like the most reliable.
Discord is great as chat program. It should’ve only ever been used for that. It completely sucks as forum replacement. Discord should’ve had very little value to any decent organization.
I have a hobby development project with a modest community and maintain a Discord server basically because it’s necessary in order to avoid reducing my potential community reach by at least 50%.
I’m active on GitHub and respond to comments and issues there. I maintain an official thread for my project on the official forum for the game it’s related to. I also keep all documentation, downloads, and guides off Discord and on the clearnet. Discord is still easily 80% or more of where people look for information about the project.
That’s great - I am obviously not talking about you in that case. I understand why people want to use it, I just don’t think Discord’s features are good enough to justify the mass adoption and the walled garden and UI are bad.
Yeah, I’m just sort of also complaining because it feels like I have to use it.
Discord is used a lot for gaming groups, modding, software development, and has largely replaced forums for lots of niche communities
Which is unfortunate. Hiding projects, code and support behind discord is just wrong.
There are Linux and open source communities on discord. I mean, just think about that for a second. These people have chosen to put their stuff on a platform that has refused to acknowledge the existence of their OS / development platform. Every other post on Reddit in the Linux community before I left was about some half assed discord workaround.
ICQ
You sure about that part? I thought they shut down. I guess they might have some user-based servers?
if you read the whole sentence it might make more sense…
i used […] in their time.
A really ugly and confusing UI.
Discord is fashionable. That’s it. The whole app is fantastically impractical if you want to use file or screen sharing. It’s just a bunch of gamers circle-jerking each other, which is a perfect way to keep them from infesting the rest of the internet.
Look, I’m as upset as you are about the enshittification of everything, but this is a bit too far.
There was always legitimate issues with Discord’s storage management, and they at least seem to be taking it seriously now.
I’m not a massive fan of Discord, but this is a bit of an overreaction.
Ok but why are you so angry about it?
I’ve been using it for years and haven’t had to pay a dime.
How have they harmed you with their free app?
Because if you didn’t expect this path when you signed up you were naive.
Now everyone complains about it but for people who had already been paying attention: this was par for the course. Of course this was going to be the outcome. Why should I be happy that everyone fell for the promises of a for-profit private company again?
Like why do you think we are on Lemmy for fucks sake? Is it not for the same reasons??
How many times do we have to be fucked by private corporations for people to learn they don’t care about us?
But every time its all “but they have a better feature set so its okay that they might enshittify in the long-run!” Literally same shit is being said about Bluesky over Mastodon right now.
You didn’t even come close to answering the question. So I’ll ask again.
How were you harmed by Discord?
That wooshing sound you hear over your head is you willfully missing the point entirely.
Like why do you think we are on Lemmy for fucks sake? Is it not for the same reasons??
*woosh
The problem being, there aren’t many alternatives around for discord. And even the ones that exist have issues of their own. Mostly relating to use base and entry barrier, in the case of the item source alternatives.
No, literally the problem is most people would rather give in and use a sleek corporate option every time.
No matter how many times they get fucked by doing that.
It’s a choice to keep getting fucked.
Lololol y’all are insane.
I’ve been using discord for free for like 8 years now. But now I can only share 10mb files and I’M FUCKED 🤣
So much entitlement.
Example one, this ^ shit-for-brains. People like him are how we end up with Discord, when alternatives like Skype have better file and screen sharing and are completely free. Because discord is fashionable. It’s where his equally brainless friends “game.”
No one is preventing you from using Skype. You are unhinged over discord 🤣.
Incredibly weird.
What an overreaction. Also FYI the free file limit was 8MB two years ago before they raised the limit to 25MB, so if anything it’s gotten better.
I saw this headline and was thinking, “Huh, I thought the limit was 8MB.”
Yeah the file limit on Skype is 300mb and has been for like a decade. Gamers are the dumbest fucking demographic on planet earth.
calm down man, no need to be so rude :(
You’re upset that I said the f-word @IntergalacticTurtleFucker@lemmy.world
Jk
you spoke the truth and it hurts (im retarded)
also I still haven’t decided if my name means that I am an intergalactic being, or if the turtles are intergalactic
Maybe it’s not even about you at all.
Intergalactic turtle, fucker.
LITERALLY UNUSABLE 🤣🤣🤣🤣
Discord is fine for 99% of users.
The people downvoting you are the ones who eat up the enshittificaion. Discord is unusable for anyone who wants file or screen sharing. Skype, by contrast, has free screen sharing that’s smoother and higher quality, and a file sharing limit of 300mb, all free for the last decade.
But yeah most users are barely computer literate so Discord keeps humming along.
Skype was annoying to use and so is element
Oh, I know. It’s squarely aimed at fucking tools who don’t even own a PC, which is why it has that “mobile first” design ethos even though their mobile apps are absolute trash.
It doesn’t matter how many times this happens, people would rather get fucked by corpos than spend time learning anything.
are you fucking kidding me?? TEN MB IN 20 FUCKING 24.
Discord is such fuckin TRASH
I was a member of a number of groups in a larger gaming community most of which migrated from Reddit/Mumble to Discord. It destroyed the quality and accessibility of written content and lore and I wish it had never happened. Then again, we can’t go back to reddit at this point either.
Guess I’ll be posting my screenshots in 640x480 from now on!
Being part of multiple servers becomes such a painful experience with that interface…even with the “folders” and the search palette.
Well, it is better than 8, but still sad.
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!
we have a bot that downloads tiktoks/Instagram/reddit videos and uploads them to the channel
Would love to see the implementation!
I like bringing stuff to the fediverse by way of cobalt.tools -> catbox.moe (shoutout Catbox for so much 100% free hotlink bandwidth) (also the owner’s trying to find a CSAM content ID solution that’s not super expensive FYI y’all)
Would love to see the implementation!

I’m using Maubot in a docker container with the Social Media Download Plugin. Here is a list of all the plugins: https://plugins.mau.bot/
Matrix is nice, but it’s still very bad UX wise.
I’ve used it on and off for years now, and about 2-4 times a month it loses my chat view encryption keys, and loses me my entire chat history. It also regularly has sync issues between devices signed into the same account, and is relatively slow sometimes to send messages.
Of course, that’s just my anecdotal experience, but I’ve tried many messaging platforms over the years, and while Matrix (and multiple of its clients, primarily Element) is the most feature-complete compared to Discord, it’s nowhere near properly usable long-term for a mass-market audience.
I agree, the security key thing is a bit of an issue. However this might a bit of a user error as well. The thing to understand is that Encryption keys are not stored on Matrix.org. If they were, then Matrix.org (or whatever homeserver you’re using) would be able to decrypt everything you can decrypt, thus making Matrix pretty useless. The solution is that keys are only stored locally on your devices. Keys are shared to other devices using the Verification process and Emoji matching thing. The problem is most users just go “Whatever!” And ignore the verification process and then have a bad experience because they don’t have Encryption keys.
The thing is, I did have encryption keys set up. The problem was that Element would repeatedly forget the very encryption keys passed by the other user, and would then have to request the keys again. Any historical message history would be permanently encrypted forever, and wouldn’t decrypt with the new view key.
After this happened about 4 times, I stopped using it, because it was impossible to maintain conversations for longer than 1-2 weeks before they’d inevitably be lost, and I’d then have to spend about an hour waiting for Element to receive the new encryption keys from the people I was contacting, even when they were already actively online.
I have no clue what was causing it, but it happened on multiple accounts, on multiple devices, all the time, and there was no conceivable fix. I’m not sure if this is fixed now, but I haven’t had a good reason to go back, especially with other encrypted messaging options out there.
I don’t know how you loose your keys all the time. But in that case you really should use a key backup.
Lose*
Removed by author
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.























