Stealing Storage from Discord

How I'm storing hundreds of gigabytes of files on Discord, for free! I wrote a server in NodeJS and a frontend in React that lets me upload any file of any size to Discord, then download it later. Works great! And even hides tax evasion evidence from the IRS!

Don't do this yourself, I didn't actually read Discord TOS but if I had I'm pretty sure it says not to do this. I'm not releasing the code (mostly because it is bad) but also because really don't do this

#nodejs #discord #cloudstorage

(so I don't get sued):
Music from Uppbeat (free for Creators!):
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[Palozon]

The internet's long-running insistance of using tax fraud as a punchline has got to be genuinely annoying for the IRS. Keep it up everyone, great bit.

[Redice_]

If they introduced data per account or device, then remember this guy here

[capella]

This is like me 25 years ago when I realised I could just attach my files to blank emails in yahoo and save them. I thought I was really clever and thought of something no one else had ever thought of too.

[illiksis]

Just a word of caution, discord itself very specifically says in it's ToS that they can ban you or delete your server for whatever reason without any chance of getting stuff back. It has happened before and entire communities are lost. This is cool, but DO NOT put anything critical in.

[adambula]

So you are the reason discord is decreasing file limits.

[isak]

My dude we were already doing this, this video just exposes our secrets to the wrong people.

[devdetour]

Woah, this is blowing up a bit, thanks everyone for stopping by. A couple frequently mentioned comments I want to address:
- *Will I release the code?* Definitely no. As I mention in the video this was a fun experiment/proof of concept, but to be clear: you shouldn't do this yourself, this is not a serious alternative to real cloud storage.
- *You should back up your data, what if Discord removes it!!* I have it all backed up with real storage solutions, and I'm fully prepared for Discord to purge all my data. Especially with this video doing well, I'm expecting it to vanish at some point :)

[PatrickJBauer]

Nice idea. Just one technical thing if you're already using node: use streaming. You don't need to "upload" your whole file to your NodeJS instance before processing. Stream your file to your server which encrypts the stream and immediately starts to upload. You can then dynamically chunk the stream while more data is incoming. Don't work on the whole file on your NodeJS part :D

[NECOdes]

That's a pretty interesting idea. You can also experiment with Telegram, just like Discord you have unlimited storage. But instead of small MB chunks, each user can upload up to 2GB per file and 4GB per file for premium users, and I'm pretty sure Telegram doesn't have a very strict ToS for these type of projects, unlike Discord.

[anonymous-iuth]

This guy's going to be real confused when all his data starts mysteriously disappearing in about a years time

[calebanderson]

what i'm really impressed with is he managed to create a node.js server that deals with files and had no memory problems

[Yabai-Wa-Yo]

I'm just here coming back after Discord lowered the File Limit back to 10 MB... and I'm so pissed now man -w-

[abdullahtahir]

A nice video to shake our own minds to look for the reson behind every facility why its free. How they are earning. Nice brainstorming and cool video. Loved it

[JakalairVG]

Wow, this takes me back. Great video btw and a crazy idea. Back in the late 1990s a few friends of mine used to do something similar with our college email account. My memory is that we used WinRAR and just broke up files to whatever the attachment limit was back then. We used this to share files back and forth because it was easier and faster than making that many floppy disks, and zip disks were expensive. The sysadmin for the system did eventually tell us to stop using his email for this purpose. Then he told us about IRC...

[Corncycle]

this is such a cool idea for a project, well done! and great presentation

running and monitoring a cdn sounds like a nightmare. there must be so many ways to exploit and annoy it, even with what the average user just considers "normal" usage (eg huge uncompressed images and videos). i do not envy the people who maintain cdns, but im very grateful they exist haha

[kevinorr]

This is pretty cool. You could steal even more storage by saving the metadata (message IDs of the chunks, filename, etc) in discord messages also, instead of storing it on your server. For instance, you could use a data structure such as a btree or a hamt and store its nodes as messages, and the root node could e.g. be the only message in a specific channel. This way you could get away with minimal memory usage on your end

[CreativeMindsAudio]

This is awesome! I was thinking you were just going to upload rar files with like 25MB each file, like how usenet newsgroups were.

[subashchandra]

This is what is known as the "Tragedy of the Commons". A free resource will always be depleted by the greedy, and eventually they're gonna have to put limits on it and make you pay for Nitro to do the same thing you used to do.

[thereallyrealplayer]

I used to use a private Discord server with only myself for storing many files like photos and videos, but I quit after just half a year. Discord began permanently preventing the loading of half the files that I uploaded there, essentially deleting them. At least I only uploaded like one gigabyte in total, but this was still very problematic.

[thatsfsguy]

ive been doing this with my art for a while now!
really convenient and makes it easier to download and share to friends