understandable why but where the hell do you host on here now-?
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.
darkxwolf17 I checked out that site and I'm a little confused, the FAQ says
"You cannot use Catbox for commercial services without prior approval. Examples include: a CDN (Content Delivery Network); image host for your business/ecommerce site (embedding hotlinks to Catbox files on your Wordpress site); or as source for videos that are streamed on sites other than files.catbox.moe directly. Clarification on the above: this only applies to files that are hotlinked outside of Catbox. If you create art, animations, or otherwise, you are free to distribute your creations via Catbox."I don't really understand what this means, can it really be used as an alternative for how we were all using Discord?
Edit: Nevermind I won't be able to use this site regardless of that anyway, it says it got banned in Australia??
littlelapin thanks for the link to that bulletin, i hadn't seen it! I added both to the op.
Bro it sucks losing access to using discord for here because it was convenient for me but thankfully filegarden is promising!
hmm. it's funny that i literally created a private server to host images for commissions..... but I mean, I guess I can still use if for a back up, at least dfgdfb not that image hosting is all i'm using it for, anyways.
and yeah, for File Garden, seems Yahoo emails do not work! it's annoying, but I do have a gmail that I never use, so I guess that will have to do ~
Edit: tested out File Garden and it seems pretty good and simple! the file system and layout is easy to use and navigate as well ~ tho it is funny that it has an image corrupter and a really bad writing AI on the site?? clearly meant for meme and funny purposes but it's just. interesting, I guess LOL
I made an alternative application because I was really partial to discords UI, and I'm here to share!
As you can imagine, It's got a discord like UI, you can save it to your phone's home screen to have it act like an app.
Additionally it is logged into with your google account and all images are saved to your own google drive, so you retain all access to your own images. All the app does is facilitate uploading them, marking them as public, and provides an easy copy link / image button for being able to share them.
It doesn't have any ads. I am not aiming to make any money off of it, nor am I planning to. I just had a really good idea and wanted to be able to share the ease of use. <3 Please feel free to share with others if you find it helpful!
Yea the slow down is inconsistent and I'm not 100% sure where it's coming from - it's something I want to look into at some point.
(For anyone reading I believe I've managed to crackdown on the slowdown issues!)
I'm glad you like it though! <3
What are people supposed to do to host images privately? Like custom assets that they don't want just sitting on public image host servers? This is honestly really annoying.
littlelapin - I would consider them private, personally speaking. They were being hosted in a server that only I had access to. Many of them were used to link images to private sources as well where photo uploads just weren’t generally possible. I hope that makes a bit more sense
To be so honest, I really can’t afford to self host with my current circumstances, so that’s definitely not an option either 😭 However I do appreciate the info and time you took to write this regardless! As for drive, my concern is the storage limit really.