[karakanb]

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.

[solstice]

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.

[godelski]

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.

[costsNall]

As someone who has saved no chat logs, and just deleted pics, letters, and such from a long gone marriage; IMO, they’re not that important.

In fact, shedding that memory shed cognitive distraction I did not know I had.

If I want to connect to people I do it here and now. Talking to the past in my head is unhealthy.

[Forbo]

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.

[costsNall]

Sorry to hear that.

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.

[eat_veggies]

The key is that the decision (and timing) to move on and delete those pics and letters should be the user's choice, not the platform's.

[Daniel_sk]

Same here. Emails are much more important to keep.

[saurik]

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.