This was because Skype’s file transfer was Peer-to-peer, so it wasn’t Skype itself hosting the files. While discord is actually hosting the files, which is much more costly.
But discord supports sending messages to people who are offline. It kind of breaks the paradigm if certain features require full synchronous communication. Maybe supporting p2p transfers during a video / voice chat would work though.
It kind of breaks the paradigm if certain features require full synchronous communication.
you mean like voice/video chat?
P2P vs hosting…
Right, so many sites try their hardest to have every thing hosted on their own platform, then they put stupid High restrictions on what you can actually do with the content because of the fact that they’re now having everything on their own host. Switching from peer to peer to Cloud hosted was in my opinion the beginning of the downfall for Skype. It removed a lot of its permissions that you could give on the platform, it broke compatibility of the Unix Community which took them two and a half years to finally fix, and it actually butchered their reliability
Fusion 360: we have unnecessarily decided to force you to use the cloud for this product
Also Fusion 360: *Noooo all you free users are using up too much of our server space, you will have to pay.
Here is an idea, let me run it on my PC and it won’t use any of your servers
skype probably didn’t save a copy of all your files forever, discord has to save a copy for the government!
Original Skype was mine blowing at the time because it was able to send files peer to peer even when people were behind firewalls. Peer to peer file transfers were the norm at the time, but when both parties were behind firewall file transfers wouldn’t work, obviously. Skype used different hacks like UDP punch to establish P2P connection and if everything failed then it would fall back to proxying.
Skype was wild with how aggressively it tried to create a direct connection. I love it for its tenacity but it would do things like open up listening sockets on common server ports (so it would conflict with e.g. a webserver) which drove me nuts at the time
Skype was mostly p2p so it enabled a lot more free functionality. Discord runs everything through its servers.
P2P exposes your IP to those you need to connect to. So if you’re a streamer or something - share a file and you dox yourself. It also means if you’re offline you can’t send the file.
It’s just not practical over remotely hosted for it to be the default. There’s other apps you can download if you still want to use P2P
“Hello, File Seller, I am going into uploading and need your strongest files”. “My files are too powerful for you, traveller”.
