[derefr]

> We have so much history in our family chat

I don't think any IM chat product has ever promised to keep your history. They all let you "scroll back" on a best-effort basis, but I don't know of any IM chat service where the availability of historical messages is part of the semantics of the service. It's just... not what they're for.

If you want the semantics of "real-time chat with history", what you actually want is a business collaboration tool, like Slack or its competitors. Businesses want records of meetings and the ability to dredge up stuff somebody said once, and are willing to pay for it, so services designed with business productivity in mind tend to have these semantics.

(And even then, I don't think Slack makes any guarantees that it'll retain the history of your private DMs, only the history of your public channels. Exporting an archive of a Slack workspace doesn't get you archives of the DMs. So it would seem that, even for a business, the semantics of one-to-one conversations are more ephemeral than not.)

[eigenvector]

Chat history was absolutely part of the semantics of Google Talk/Hangouts. You've always been able to search that history in Gmail by using the filter "in:chats" and it used to be explicitly exposed in the Gmail UI as a label. Every last word is saved there unless you choose not to have it.

[PunchTornado]

Well I can trust Facebook Messenger to always keep my data there and never delete it.

Which for a chat service is really good.

[exitheone]

You can? When did they promise that? What is stopping them from throwing away history next year?

[cableshaft]

ICQ and Trillian would save your chat history if you put something in the settings. I don't think AIM did, but I was able to export them individually, I think. I still have a decent amount of my chat log history from back then because of it. I have a lot more of it from back then than I do now that it's all done within hangouts/facebook.