Discord isn’t a social media. With platforms like facebook, you’re still paying for all your storage, just not with money. There’s ads all over the platform, and all your content is data mined to be sold to advertisers. Discord doesn’t data mine (to my knowledge) OR run ads. Would you prefer a higher limit at the cost of having ads all over the interface? The AWS bill has to get paid somehow, nothing is free.

This was my core point. I don’t consider a business raising prices or gating features as a direct result of those features increasing their cost as “enshittification”. Stickers being paid, custom emojis, etc, that doesn’t cost Discord anything to provide, making that paid is enshittification; But if the feature itself costs the business actual money to provide, does everyone just expect them to eat that cost forever, in a lot of cases for absolutely no revenue from the users?

Calling out businesses for not giving stuff that costs them money away for free just, doesn’t fundamentally make sense to me. Why is it just expected of Discord that they pay to store all your large files? A lot of “freemium” services like GMail recoup some of that money by mining your email for data that it can sell to advertisers, or eating the cost in an attempt to lock you into an ecosystem where you’ll spend money. Storing files on Discord is neither of those things.

Don’t get me wrong, a lot of services are enshittifying, and making their services worse so you spend more money with them— but adjusting your quotas and pricing to reflect your real world cost of business is not that. To frame it as though you are entitled to free compute and resources from companies that don’t owe you anything comes off as just that, entitled. The cloud isn’t free. If you want to use a service, you should pay for it if you can.

I don’t see this as enshittification. It’s a real thing that’s happening, but raw storage is expensive. They pay for it directly. Unlike artificially limiting features that are “free” to them, this genuinely isn’t, it’s not even really super discounted for them on the backend. They’re likely just paying for a series of S3 buckets.

It’s really not though. It’s actually pretty simple under the hood.

They claim it in the article, and in a few other publications, but I haven’t seen anything that explicitly confirms, from sunbird, that this is the case, including on their website. They also make claims on their website that conflict with that architecture, as I don’t believe it would be possible to E2E encrypt messages like they claim they do. I kinda wonder if the Mac Mini claim is an assumption that everyone just ran with, without confirming that it’s true. I could be wrong though, I’ll gladly eat my words if anyone has a primary source to cite, but that architecture and business model just doesn’t appear to be compatible with their claims.

In the article it mentions that the service is run by sunbird. Just by reading their FAQ it doesn’t actually sound like they are MITM’ing messages via some mac server somewhere. It actually sounds more plausible to me that they are doing all the magic “on device”. They specifically mention that this won’t work on multiple phones at the same time, that’s what’s tipping me off.

What I suspect is happening is that the phone itself is spoofing an actual iPhone, and connecting to Apple servers as if it is one. Normally you wouldn’t be able to do this, Apple sells the phones, so they know all the serial numbers that should be able to access iMessage, and would be able to block anything that doesn’t report to be a real iPhone. What I think may be happening is that sunbird could be buying up pallets of dead, old, or otherwise unusable iPhones for pennies on the dollar, and using those serial numbers to pretend they were an iPhone from another device (like the nothing phone) directly.

This would make sense with their business model, according to their FAQ they have “no reason to charge money” for their product yet. Buying access to iMessage for a few bucks upfront with no ongoing cost would match up with what they are claiming, and it would be extremely hard for Apple to detect on their end, as they would appear to be all sorts of models, bought at different times, in different places, and signed in by real people.

I want to reiterate that this is pure speculation on my part, it’s just a theory. Which this would mean that (in theory) chats could (and would) be E2E encrypted from sender to receiver, ultimately it’s still Nothing/Sunbird’s app, so they could be doing anything with it on device.

Yup, those clauses should be illegal. Especially nowdays. In the past, you could cross out sections you don’t agree too before signing, or negotiate the contract somehow. But now, contracts are very clearly designed as a “take it or leave it” offer, and when literally everyone in a given marketplace for an essential product or service has the same clauses, it effectively removes your rights.

My guy, the feature is literally named “Autopilot”. By definition they are advertising it as a system that can PILOT the car AUTOMATICALLY. It doesn’t matter what they put in the fine print, they are blatantly describing the system as autonomous.

That has been a feature in all of their competitors for 10+ years.