I gotta admit, I have no problem with introducing a completely new feature and locking it to paying members. But taking away an already existing feature from non-members, or limiting it in some way, is simply outrageous. They could've kept the upload limit at 25MB, and increased it for Nitro users to something like an entire gigabyte. This would've encouraged people to get Nitro. But lowering the upload limit for free users would just encourage them to leave and find an alternative (and the problem is that there aren't any viable ones because they aren't used as much).
They should've never increased the size to 25MB. Now everyone is mad they can't upload files larger than 10MB, instead of being happy that Discord allows free file sharing up to 10MB.
That's why you need to keep free product features and small and useless as possible; people will happily take improvements but complain to hell and back if you accidentally overcommit.
Meanwhile most Lemmy servers have an upload limit of what, a megabyte?
If Discord was open source, I actually would not mind paying a fee for it. Fixed or reccurring, ideally the former. But that's never happening. And forget buying that Nitro thing.
Also, if storing all that data is hard...trim all the chat logs after awhile....oh wait...then you wouldn't be able to keep records of everything everyone's ever done on there.
I am fortunate enough to know how to set up VMs and use Linux, so I run my own IRC server with a web interface (TheLounge). I can set the upload limit to what I want and settled for 100MB. This way my friends and I are not at the mercy of some proprietary software.
I do pay for a dedicated server that I also use to host my games' servers and also a mumble server, but it's so worth it, just to have control over our stuff.