For me, they literally mean "history". Some conversation with a friend who passed away, chats with an ex-lover, remembering school years, tons of memories. I believe at this point those messages are an important part of my past.
In other words, if I had a chance to record, search and navigate through real life conversations, I would have done that too; it is way better to have records than to try to remember things.
I totally understand what you mean and I also frequently look up older conversations to enjoy again the in-jokes, banter and actually useful information of my chats.
However to avoid 1) having to manually delete things and 2) accumulating hundreds of megabytes of messages and 3) to not be swamped by months and years of "can you call?", "alright, see you later" and other ultimately meaningless stuff, I have conversations in Signal with my frequent interlocutors set to expire after a month.
To save things, I currently simply screenshot the relevant parts of the conversation or forward them to my "Notes to myself" thingy for later. It's a bit manual, but at least it's simple to remember: what I don't actively save disappears. Screenshots leave out audio messages and gifs (to a certain extend) but it is at least something. (And I just realised that with Signal it's actually possible to download individual audio messages and video so that a later reconstitution is possible if tedious.)
However, what would be great is to indeed have a way to backup messages including stickers, audio, videos etc. in a more high-fidelity way to relive important converations.
Personally all I want is a way to save specific messages. Like my friend recently sent me a recipe. That's nice to save. Everything else I'm fine cutting off at like 500 messages or something. I guess a lot of this saving doesn't bother me because back in the T9ing days you couldn't save many messages and no one batted an eye. I'm surprised at the major paradigm shift, but also most communication happens through text now which is also interesting.
I vouched for your comment, because your experience is still a valid data point.
As a counter to that, I lost a close friend to suicide. It was really good to be able to reflect back on the conversations we had and relive the lighter moments we shared together. I agree that dwelling on those things can be unhealthy, but they can also be a valuable part of the healing process.
I went through the same in my 20s, grieved and moved on.
For what ever reason, reconnecting to it just makes me mad and depressed now. He’s not dealing with environmental collapse, political unrest, economic inequality, racism...
I find leaning into my anger over reality now leads me to be more productive than ennui over people no longer around to concern themselves with those issues.
Great for you. I happen to have spent my life talking to people using messaging apps instead of email, including business contacts and family. If you think your email is somehow valuable and my instant messaging logs aren't, that feels quite a bit insulting.
They're different mediums with different expectations of ephemerality. Chat history sits somewhere between speaking IRL and sending letters (but to be clear, is not a simple combination; it's its own thing) and nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house.
People do burn their letters for valid reasons (or use more naturally ephemeral media like phone calls, talking IRL, or Signal's disappearing messages) but those reasons are orthogonal to moving house or getting a new phone.
In any case, if people want to save chat history, the appropriate response is to support that requirement rather than to tell users that no, we've decided that they actually do not want to do that.
... particularly given that Signal does have this feature--maybe not as smooth or easy as it should be, but still totally functional--on Android; so it isn't even a consistent argument that "we've decided they actually do not want to do that"!
>nobody burns their letters when they move to a new house
Actually that's usually when I finally make the effort to burn old mail that I can't just throw away. (insurance payment paperwork, credit card bills, etc)
I just never delete messages. Chat histories are an integral part of my past, and my past is what makes me, me.
That said, I deleted my WhatsApp account today just because some organizations assumed that this was an acceptable and convenient way of reaching me if I gave them my phone number. Didn't use it much anyway.
That is a liability. Imagine if every word you have ever uttered to anyone is permanently recorded and can be used against you any time in the future, forever.
Some people use chat software for more than just chitchatting and want the history as a memory.
This is the reason why mattermost exists - the devs lost their chat history of some enterprise solution and thought: never again. So they created mattermost.
This. Signal devs should understand that different people have different use cases as well as different tolerances for (theoretical) secrecy/privacy. Some convos/groups are worth keeping history for, others probably not. Signal does not have anyway to know which so should let the user decide and allow for an easy(ier) backup/restore option.
You imply that they don't understand this. Are you sure this is the case? It could be that their priorities are simply elsewhere. Things will take time, even with funding because any crypto/security mistake will be so incredibly more damaging for them than for any other software shop. This goes especially for conversation backups.
I see it like more like email history (I don't really delete emails either) -- if someone sent me something, I like to be able to reference it later. It's not something I do super often, but it's nice to be able to do.
Do you take photos and keep those around or you just don’t use cameras? If you do preserve photos, why? Before cameras were invented, most people (who couldn’t paint or pay a painter) had experiences and events only in their memories. You could follow that for photos and videos too. Or get a camera that shows the photo you took for a few seconds and then erase it permanently.
I’m not trolling either. The point is not whether you value something to look back on in the future or not. It’s that a lot of people value that and would use a service that aligns with those needs. Chats can also have photos and videos that someone else shared. It’s not easy or clear to many people that they should save or offload those from an (unreliable) chat app if they want to look back at those later.
Serious question, really? Like when you're just having beers with your friends? Why? Does it make your friends feel uncomfortable? What's the benefit to you?
I mean work/project meetings, not "social gatherings". Essentially, when an encounter serves more that just a social purpose and information is shared, I either want a record of that meeting (information) to be kept or for that meeting not to take place at all if there is nothing noteworthy (again, does not apply to meetings that have a predominantly social function).
I believe it's because they are not stored on a server. They only disappear if you delete all the messages. I suppose it could keep an index of groups locally to the phone though.
From time to time, I stumble across some old message; typically an email, photo, chat or even a physical object, and I'm profoundly reminded of some part of my past I had completely forgotten about.
People I have lived with, adventures I've been on, jobs I've done, projects I've engaged with, academic papers I'm an author on, and especially special moments and times with loved ones. Intimate conversations. Photos with great stories behind them.
Bear in mind also that some special photos, long personal messages and even videos and voice recordings only exist in chat platforms these days. Although I find it is mainly text that has the most profound triggering of memories.
I can't make a long enough list of the kinds of things I don't realise are in my memory until it's jogged, and I can't emphasise enough how rich the tapestry of past life parts seems to be.
I simply forget how rich my life has been. How much I've done with other people (despite the fact I don't spend much time with people). How many places I've been, how many wonderful people I've been with.
When reminded, by accident, it's an amazing feeling, like having a whole past self come to life for a few minutes.
I'm, like, "wow, I'd completely forgotten", and enjoying the full VR-in-my-head experience while myriad connections are activated.
It's an immensely touching and pleasurable thing to have things like that brought back, and it's completely different from ordinary remembering. It's much more vivid, accompanied by wow feelings, and just does not happen with ordinary recall.
In an interesting comparison to day to day thinking, it tends to be very consistently good feeling too. Most things day to day feel like a grind. There are many awful past experiences. But the kinds of memory activation I'm talking about tend to be associated with immensely positive, glad feelings - it's as if those feelings need years to pass and change to happen to "brew" into something that is felt in a different way.
Dwelling in the past excessively is unhealthy. But occasionally stumbling across something that awakens a completely forgotten and yet cherished long-lost memory-network is like getting to know myself, who I am now and who I was then, and be amazed at how much larger my life has been than I normally think of it day to day, no matter what I'm doing each day.
It only happens about twice a year I guess, if that. When it does I'm also reminded how much larger must the set of other things be that are not being remembered, that would completely and vividly transform my view of my life, and feelings about my life, if they were to be activated. I feel a sense of awe to recognise that my perception of myself in the present is, in some sense, tiny, blinkered and mundane compared to my actual real life, and not at all representative of the fullness of who I am, have been, and therefore will probably be in future.
I'm trying to say that, for me, some kinds of accidentally prompted memory-networks are incredibly valuable for obtaining perspective on life; my life, and life of people in general.
For me that helps me to connect better to people here and now, and I think it makes me a better person to others, in the now, to be reminded of such things.
In other words, if I had a chance to record, search and navigate through real life conversations, I would have done that too; it is way better to have records than to try to remember things.