Comment by marcodiego
21 hours ago
Around 2008 I saw two girls, not too versed in technology, share a mp3 song over bluetooth. At the time I thought that if technology finally arrived at the point where "normal people" could be able to do things that required lots of technical knowledge just a few years ago then we were very close to a future where technology could be a giant enabler of powers to everyone.
I am really ashamed by how wrong I was and how WE allowed things to became so artificially limited.
In high school (2003-2007) it was super easy for any of my friends and I (varying technical levels) to send arbitrarily large files to each other with AOL Instant Messenger's Direct Connect. Honestly not even sure how a non-technical person would do that nowadays.
In Europe, people use WhatsApp for this. Ridiculous to go through a chat app for this, but it works.
They wouldn’t.
This is intentional.
The closest I've seen is 'send file over message service or e-mail', but this has a decently low maximum file size.
The alternative for larger files is Dropbox or Google Drive or similar and share a link, but there are limits to how full you can have those be, so sending a 5 GB file might be inconvenient if you don't pay for the upgraded service.
For anything larger than that again, I don't think I would do anything than pass a physical flash drive, since there's nothing else that has a lower barrier of entry and I can rely on a random person to be able to use and understand.
I have upgraded dropbox and google accounts and also a VPS, so it wouldn't be hard for me. But for people who aren't big fucking nerds, nothing exists that's as easy as that. Email's limit is crazy low.
Nowadays it's done by uploading something to Google drive and then sharing the link so someone can then download it.
Expensive, overly complex, and stupidly slow.
and deeply surveil-able.
Sadly for "normal people" you just share links now. You don't have an MP3 to even send.
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