Comment by grishka
3 years ago
Sure, then allow me to send larger files and delete them after a while to reclaim disk space, and/or compress images and videos server-side so they take up less space. Heck, even the old-school ICQ-like direct file transfer, maybe through a proxy server of some sort, would be much, much better than this stupid limit.
You can send larger files if you pay for Nitro - basic is $30/yr and allows 50MB, normal is $100/yr and allows 500MB (they recently upped it from 100MB).
And to be fair to them, they offer a ton of features for free - 8MB seems reasonable IMO - though I do agree that some form of auto-compression if your file exceeds the limits would be nice... on the other hand, the infra to run ffmpeg on videos or imagemagick on photos is not free either...
They already process your images to generate thumbnails so that infrastructure is already in place. Then again, I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
Direct file transfers don't incur any storage costs whatsoever, it's only bandwidth. They also already have the relay servers to support WebRTC calls. They could've solved this problem for little to no additional cost if they wanted to. The problem is that they don't want to.
As for paying, Telegram has mostly the same business model (selling subscriptions but also ads in channels for free users) and allows uploading 1.5 GB files for free. With the premium subscription that is doubled to 3 GB.
Oh wow, I wonder how Telegram manages it... because it has an order of magnitude more users than Discord, so economies of scale ?? Or because it might be used a LOT less for non-text ??
> my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
Well, the whole point of this discussion is that (unless if you do it by PM) this counts as (folk)lore, so you shouldn't assume that.
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> I don't need those files to stick around forever as part of the chat history, my primary use case is to show someone something. No one will come back to that file ever again.
I'd suggest uguu.se for this. Hosts up to 134MB per file for 48 hours. No BS web interface and can alternatively use local ShareX screenshotting tool to upload directly to it to grab a link automatically.
Discord will render still the thumbnail for the link and then after the file expires it will just stop rendering in the chat history.
There are a few free, donation-supported temporary file hosts of a similar nature. Discord ime provides just enough free hosting to be broadly convenient, while for larger uploads with 'Nitro boosts' to a Discord group everyone participating gains increased upload limits.