Please reduce data usage from images

Note for moderators: This is not a duplicate of other topics that request a seperate "lite version" of Discord. This request is about something else, and I couldn't find a similar post by searching.

Dear developers of Discord, Hammer And Chisel,

you have given us a great social hub to connect with players from all around the world, and your service is very accessible since it is for free. Though a significant amount of people struggle with using Discord since bandwidth is very bad in many countries and loading via mobile data can be a real pain. There is a lot of potential for data saving which could speed up loading times drastically.

When using the developer console in Google Chrome browser, we see which assets cause most data transfer and loading times. So as an example I loaded the general chat channel of one of my favourite servers and see the following statistics:

• Data transfered: 5.8 MB
• Load: 46.4 s

A big part of that are javascript elements from /assets but the biggest offender by far are server/user icons and emojis with 2.3 MB in this case! Any kind of image file is very data heavy and therefore it would be great if users get at least one of the following solutions:

• impose stricter file size limits for user-submitted images
• compress user-submitted images stronger
• give users an option to not load images on their end: this would replace emojis with their actual text (like :smile:), and replace server / user icons and server banners with blank dummies

These are not essential elements of the user experience so we can probably live without them. You already have similar functions in the "text & image" settings tab that allow us to hide emoji reactions and embedded website previews so it should be possible to take another step towards data saving.

Thank you very much for reading, and I would appreciate support from fellow users who agree with this request.