Microblog Memes

Orrrr they have a u8 chat_participant_id of some kind and a binary data format for message passing. The GROUP_CHAT_LIMIT const may have a bigger data type, but they may very well be trying to conserve 3 bytes per message. Ids can easily start at 0.

150 gigs of bandwidth saved per day doesn't seem like a whole lot at their scale, but if they archive all the metadata, that's over 50 terabytes a year saved on storage - multiplied by how many copies they have of their data. Still not a lot tbh, but if they also conserve data in every other place they can, they could be saving petabytes per year in storage.

Still weird because then they'd have to reuse ids when people leave, otherwise you could join and leave 255 times to disable a group lol

And we're talking about a value that would require a 9-bit unsigned int to store it, at a minimum (and therefore at least a 16-bit integer in sizes that actually exist for types). Unless it's 8-bit and interprets a 0 as 256, which is highly unorthodox and would require bespoke coding basically all over instead of a basic num <= GROUP_CHAT_LIMIT.

I think you're just very confused friend, or misunderstanding how binary counting works, because why in the 9 hells would they be using 9 bits (512 possible values) to store 8 bits (256 possible members) of data?

I think you're confusing indexing (0-255) with counting (0-256), and mistakenly including a negation state (counting 0, which would be a null state for the variable) in your conception of the process. Because yes, index 255 is in fact count 256 and 0 would actually be 1. Index = count -1