Comment by BlueTemplar

3 years ago

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.

> Oh wow, I wonder how Telegram manages it...

It's simply the experience and some of the tech stack from VK because most people who built Telegram worked at VK before that. VK, being a Facebook-like social media service, allowed people to upload all kinds of things — photos, videos, music, and even arbitrary files up to 200 MB. Telegram even praises itself on "unlimited cloud storage". I never asked anyone about it, but I'm sure that it works out to each user, on average, not consuming much storage, because most of the media content people send is compressed images.