I guess what I'm saying is I'm real pissy about the fact that a website with "really not a lot of resources" still took it upon themselves to not compromise on that while every other big platform will do that as the first cost-cutting measure and not think twice about it.
While you can argue that 5MB (if you didnt pay for cohost! plus and got 10mb) might not be a lot for images... it's (I feel) manageable because cohost gave a very clear indication of the limit. And as an artist/photographer posting your stuff online you're probably pretty familiar with image compression tools already (or hell, even the "Export for Web" feature of Photoshop for example) (https://squoosh.app/ is good, btw) so I feel it works out.
Every other social media site won't say shit and will just compress your stuff to hell and back because it "reduces friction".
I feel sometimes friction is good if it means making things slightly better but what do I know.
The thing is that like... it would not be difficult for a website to just say: hey this file is kind of big, we are going to do our best to compress it down to $SIZE, or you could reupload a reasonably-sized version
But giving users agency and control is so inimical to how those organizations think; having consistent and long-lived rules ("image uploads are $SIZE or smaller") is so antithetical to their entire ethos; so instead even if you do compress your images down to a reasonable size, they will fucking mangle it anyway.
you know it's all fucking imagemagick on the backend too
it's like... these fucking corpo platforms are just so lowest common denominator. why have images that look good instead of looking like shit; your target audience are people who want shit, and your 'creators' are purveyors of shit
