That part is such a joke. I routinely run into the problem that I can't send someone a screencast because it's over EIGHT MEGABYTES. In 2023. And Discord insists on storing the bit-perfect copies of original images and videos too to add to the insult. I would be perfectly fine with them being compressed and/or stored temporarily but nah. I have to resort to cloud storage services like Yandex disk to go around that asinine limitation.
Your files are too powerful, my ass.
Same. I can't just hit print screen and paste it into Discord, a single frame of my 3440x1440 resolution is too big for their free file size limit. I have to crop and/or scale it first. Just frustrating and an extra few steps.
(And I would prefer that my files weren't arbitrarily modified by the host. BTW, there is software, like ShareX, which allows you to automatically do operations on files when you capture them.)
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...
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.
> 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.
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.
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.