this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2025
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100 billion messages per day and over half of them in groups apparently. It's a lot, but 3 bytes per message is still not a lot of data. I'd guess they pack the metadata as tight as possible.
That's the thing, right? What's "a lot of data" at these scales? Since they keep all these messages indefinitely (and users keep up to two copies of each, too) that's 100 gigs of data per byte that they save per day. 40 Terabytes per year. Plus 40 more among their collective users and another 40 presumably stashed in some Google Drive somewhere.
It's a lot for me, and it'll cost you what? A couple grand to store at home? That's a drop in the ocean of a company like Meta with petabytes upon petabytes of garbage stored all over the place... but then again, if I was making a thing and I could shave 40TB a year of storage I... probably would?
I don't know, the scope of modern, monopolistic online services is mind-boggling. I'm in the space where I'm savvy enough to understand how massive this nonsense is but also not working on it directly enough to be desensitized about the numbers. It's like trying to figure out how many people live on the planet, your brain can parse that it can't parse what you're trying to do and the dissonance makes you all wobbly.