Don't know if it's up here, found it on r/ProgrammerHumor and thought it deserved to be shared :)

Just ask any random computer guy and you have your answer, useless clueless journalist.

@Strannch
I understand what 256 is
but how would it relate to a group chat participants count?
Can you help me out here I might be missing out on something important ^_^

@ukabthebest Well the joke is that the person who wrote it wrote "oddly specific number". In my opinion, the number is lovely and pretty round. Most probably the journalist does not know anything about the bits and would expect a number like 200 or 250 or alike

@ukabthebest probably because the counter is set to be from 0 to 256 (they don't expect more people). Which is the exact amount of possibilities a byte can store (since the actual maximum is 255, it's shifted by 1 I guess, because there isn't 0 member groups)

Of course there aren't 0 member groups but 1 byte of users in one group.
So there are useres 0 to 255 (256 in total) possible in one group.
You don't use the byte to count the number of users in one group.

One byte should be enough for anybody...

Showed this to my girlfriend, she has no clue why this is funny. 😂

When the next update will bring the participants to 16386 more questions will arise

This is why devs should control the media.

@-eth I believe it should be 16384

Also, is there any practical reason they could have settled on that number, except that it's a nice power of 2?

Waiting until a group can contain NaN participants.

@sebh0602 yes. See above

@sebh0602 I assume it has something to do with either the byte size (256 possibilities) or 256*maxlengthofusername/mobilenumber is close to 32 bit integer?

Can only guess though.

To make it more clear for some here: There will be some sort of database (probably sql) which stores the group properties. Every column in the database table can be of a specific data type (byte/int/...). Because most of the groups will likely have a size <= 256, the devs decided to set the data type to byte to reduce the used size (because every number in this column will be stored as the specified type, no matter how small it is).

@sebh0602 sorry got carried out by my generation intel processor

*next update* bytes will now have stories...

@chrisalexthomas some people are fine with just a nibble

@Forside I read they use Erlang's mnesia, but it's probably better there as well. Another thing is fitting information in as few tcp packages as possible.

Oddly specific?
I think you mean Oddly Satisfying 😜

Number is not odd. It's even!

Wow, this post is now at 256 ++. It's not clear what that oddly specific number even means.

Absolutely Outrageous!

256 members? At the time this was posted, Telegram allowed 10000 members in a group, today it's 200000. And I still wonder why there should be a limit at all.

Does someone know why sometimes WhatsApp groups can hold a maximum of 257 people inside despite the limit being 256 LOL 😂

@geeezzz Such an oddly specific number, nobody knows I guess
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Normies have to know!