Direct transfer is nice, but sometimes people aren't online at the exact same time. I remember when Skype was solely peer to peer, and you'd have to wait to download a file shared in a group chat until the person who shared it was online again.

As a former https://file.pizza user, I had the same question

but file.pizza doesn't seem to work anymore (for me at least)

There's a laundry list of alternatives to file.pizza [0][1]. https://webwormhole.io/ is one.

wormhole.app is comparable to the now defunct uplovd.com and Firefox Send.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17356023

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22273674

We store the end-to-end encrypted file so that the link continues to work after you close the tab. Sometimes the recipient isn't online when you send the link and we want it to still work in that case.

We're considering a "P2P only" option that doesn't send anything to the cloud. Since files are end-to-end encrypted, it doesn't matter from a privacy perspective, but it does help to save bandwidth (and cost for us) if you know you don't need the files stored.