Discord no longer viable for file hosting (upd8 2)

Posted 7 months, 11 days ago (Edited 2 months, 15 days ago) by GutterGlitter

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.


Kayfabe

i’m trying to register at filegarden but how am i supposed to type my birth date? it shows my date incorrectly or tells me it’s invalid

Kaiju_K9

Masiel I typed it’s as (example) 01022004 and it worked like that iirc, there should be small text on the bottom that displays the month date and year to confirm it’s the right birthdate as well

Kayfabe

Kaiju_K9 i tried like that and it’s still giving me an invalid date 💀 i give up i’ll just put whatever numbers that work, but idk why it messes the date for me

(i can edit my date in the account settings :] )

heroicallyheroic

SCREAMS ??? SOBS ???? thats all i have to say 

heroicallyheroic

im gonna be honest this doesnt even effect our toyhouse stuff it effects our rentry stuff

GutterGlitter

added more info to op because we finally have confirmation that this is exactly what the new link protocol is for

teddiebearie

does anyone know if file garden has a terms of service/privacy policy? I can't find one on their website and the patreon link has almost nothing on it

Karmawish

thanks for keeping us updated! I don't have tumbr so I would've missed that and it's really helpful to know so I can move my stuff to a safer place before this happens.

godwaltz

teddiebearie went a little searching, theres this page that appears to be the privacy policy... although there doesnt appear to be anything yet https://filegarden.com/privacy/

Firmware

Oope, good thing I saw this. I'll be rehosting all my images today then 😭

Sheep

Just wanted to pop my head in here and say, ive used postimage since the death of majhost in 2015; and ive been told that sometimes when you direct link to an image, it will redirect to postimage's website...which normally isn't a problem. But ive gotten comments, more than once, that sometimes postimage will have ads on their website for xxx rated content. I cannot confirm or deny this because: 1. I see the direct links since I generated them. 2. I have an ad block 3. I havent direct linked image since discord became an alternative so they might have changed this.

This won't effect if you want to use images in coding. But if you use images, in say a Google document, and link them, apparently these are the times it was happening.

darkxwolf17

can i also give a recommendation catbox?


UPDATE: you can host music here too !!! 

kekhtarakh

gonna throw cloudinary out there for an asset host. ive used it in the past to host assets for a website. believe images have a 10 mb limit. you can also upload images from google drive and dropbox on there for safekeeping— nifty!

im surprised i havent seen sta.sh mentioned seeing as a lot of artists already use that to host their art. i personally havent used it outside of a handful of instances where i need to privately link a submitted art piece so i cant speak to how good or bad it is