Fuck. guess I gotta host all of my screenshots on my own server now. Welp, Linode gets more of my money.
Edit: THE END TIMES ARE HERE!!! FIND A FILE HOST NOW!!!
Discord has officially put this change in place. As of 2/23/24, files hosted on discord will not be accessible outside of discord. I personally reccomend postimage for images and filegarden for audio, more details below.
IMPORTANT: i've been seeing a lot of comments about how this is a bad decision on discord's part. While discord DOES make a lot of bad decisions, THIS ISN'T ONE OF THEM - while using discord as a file host for external websites was convenient, it was also abuse of their server space. Discord is a chat client with infrastructure made to bear the weight of messaging. It does not have the server capacity to act as a media host. Media hosting for other sites (the only thing this change impacts) is very resource-heavy, and not all services are equipped to bear that load. This change was put in place to prevent discord's finite server space from being misused, and this is something that websites have been doing in various ways since the 2000s for the same reason. PLEASE USE DESIGNATED SERVICES FOR YOUR FILES, "WELL IT WORKS FOR NOW" WILL ONLY HURT YOU LATER
- love, your friendly neighborhood netizen
anyway back to your regularly scheduled post, reorganized because this has happened now. sorry if it's a mess
more info in this tumblr post, i decided to share it here because i use discord for the audio files i use in my codes :( essentially, links to things hosted on discord will expire shortly after the link is made, so you won't be able to use links to discord messages (including images or text files) permanently outside of discord.
Now is a great time to find actual image/file hosting places because discord uhhhh was never for that anyway. I'll be working on ways to use audio files hosted on other storage sites so when the change goes out i can help people with my codes. There's a list of hosting sites in the tumblr post, I personally use imgur for most of my stuff! < don't do this. see update below
i might also repost this/a link to the thread here in service reviews bc i know a lot of people use discord to host proof screenshots 😬
Avistella has provided a nice selection of alternatives in this comment, and theglitzyhive has a bulletin here with his own list of alternatives and some offline content preservation tips you may find useful. please check out these resources!
moif made this tool that provides a discord-like interface for accessing files on your google drive like you've been doing on discord! Thank you so much for making this!
Thanks to ferdie for mentioning that the images themselves aren't lost! You can paste the image url back into discord, and it'll still work, so you can save them from there and reupload them somewhere else! THIS HAS BEEN CONFIRMED TO WORK BY OTHER USERS - HANG ONTO YOUR LINKS!
some clarifications for people reading this thread, who aren't that well versed in how image hosting works!
Will this effect images in your servers? No. The ONLY thing this will effect is links from other websites outside of discord to media in discord messages. Nothing in your servers or messages is getting deleted. We don't have enough information to know how this will effect things between servers, though, so I can't speak on that.
What is an image host? For people on the internet to see an image from your computer, it has to be hosted somewhere on the internet with a permanent web address, and whenever someone loads a web page with that image on it, the page on their screen has to be able to read that web address to retrieve the image from your host and display it. Most sites can host the images used on their own pages without issue, for example, toyhouse hosting the images in your characters' galleries and user avatars. For things beyond the scope of what the site allows their servers to store, an image hosting service outside the site is needed - for example, the images used in peoples' user layouts and character codes.
What is hotlinking? Hotlinking is when you take a link to an image hosted on someone else's server and use that link to serve the image on your website. For example, if I uploaded a picture to my own website on my own server, and you copied the same link to it on my server for your own website. Hotlinking from sites that don't have the server space for it is bad! Because you have to get the image from its host every single time someone loads the page it's on, hotlinking to a server that was meant for one website will put multiple websites' worth of strain on the server. This was a cardinal sin in the 2000s, but they don't teach this stuff anymore.
"ALTERNATIVES" THAT ARE NOT ALTERNATIVES: Imgur and neocities!!! I keep seeing people suggest imgur as neocities for hotlinking purposes. Imgur's TOS forbids doing this (and they make it super hard to do anyway) and they'll ban you from the site if they find out. Neocities blocks hotlinking entirely, which is what discord has chosen to do. THEY WILL HOST YOUR IMAGES, BUT YOU CAN'T HOTLINK TO THEM ON YOUR SITES.
Oh boy. Haven't heard of this. To be completely honest I'm not too unhappy about this. I never used discord for hosting much and a lot of files people host on discord have a hard time loading on my end or just appear broken for unknown reasons, which always bothered me.
Was just going to make a post about this, thanks for beating me to it!! Super annoying because I throw all my images in a private server instead of on imgur or something similar. It is (was) extremely convenient, but it makes sense why they're doing it.
I've heard file.garden, catbox.moe, github, backblaze b2, postimages, & imgbox as alternatives but I know nothing about them. I'm just throwing some names out there in case anyone wants to investigate (which I will have to soon, rip.)
Neocities.org and Imgur cannot be used as a file dump, that is against their rules.
For a second, I thought that meant that the files would also be deleted but at least I can still use it as a online hardrive/storage until I get my own comupter. Guess, I have to start using google drive. Gonna be real honest, I used discord just because I didn't feel like making another account for image hosting when discord was right there for me.
Also, I'm clueless with this stuff so, I'm wondering, is there actually any benefits or reasons for them to make the links temporary?
i know using chat software for image hosting was a stupid idea
didn't stop me from creating entire server dedicated to only hosting and now every page i ever made is going to break on me
nice to know that a large chunk of my forum posts (offsite or onsite) are gonna be completely broken & contextless in the next month or so. At least own site is safe since I prefer hosting as much as I can onsite bc of changes like this but I'm still pissed tbh. Hopefully I can catch everything in my codes in time
Seriously, ik using a chat app was a bad idea for longterm storage but what's with every service speedrunning linkrot this decade?
Personally i use toyhouse to host images. Ive got a private character with 70+ images of pictures ive needed to link (both screenshots or like doodles for a ref)
(unironically have that image (and all my other reaction images) hosted on Discord lol)
You're telling me that I have to go through all 500+ of my codes, check if they use Discord to host my images and then update them accordingly? I don't wannaaaaaaaaaaa
The thing I loved about Discord was that I already had an account so I didn't need to make a new one for image hosting, it allowed me to organize images into different channels, and it was convenient to just copy-paste an image and then immediately get the direct link rather than save and upload.
I really don't want to make a new account on a site to just host images, so I'll probably stick with Google Drive for now. :/ (Here's a link that helps in getting the direct link for Google Drive files for anybody that might be considering on using it)
DreamyDinosaur hosting images that are loaded by only the people in the message/server is a LOT less intensive than hosting an image that gets sent to everyone who loads up the page that the image is on on a website. If I post an image on a server, it gets seen by a handful of people, but if I put it on my profile that image has to load for everyone who comes across my page and any web services. Discord probably isn't made to get that much file traffic, and considering how many people use it for that, it was probably putting a weight on their servers.
DreamyDinosaur Its to cut down people using Discord as a file dump. It takes a lot of money and space to host files, and they don't want to do all that for free- and it was never Discord's intention to be a file hosting platform. It's all in their benefit to change links to expire!! Sucks for us though 😔
(Whoops someone beat me to it!!)
Oh okay, I see now. Thanks the both of you for explaining, I mainly use discord to storage images so I don't mind that too much but it does kinda suck even with how understandable it is.
Cinnamon_paws i can see that being a good solution for onsite stuff like forum posts and codes! That's what I'm doing for my code graphics as well, but I might find other ways to use it bc it's a pretty good way to keep things organized in galleries/subaglleries.