[greatgib]

For me, chat history has a huge value.

How many times things looks like meaningless when they are said but have a lot of values at a later date?

For example, sometimes you wonder, "when was it that time when XXX event happened". Or "I remember that one day someone told me that he had the same problem as me, but who was it and what was his solution?"

Otherwise, we are used to share thousands of links and snippets with my friends that we usually discuss. A lot of time, after a very long time (sometimes years), for some reason we remember that something or link about a topic was discussed long time ago, and then it is convenient to look into the history with keywords to find back the links and what was said at that time!

[moepstar]

>"when was it that time when XXX event happened"

Then you go and look that up in your issue tracker.

>"I remember that one day someone told me that he had the same problem as me, but who was it and what was his solution?"

Ideally, you've that saved to your Wiki/FAQ Database or at least have it in your ticketing system.

That is, if we're talking about a professional setting - or some random "might be useful later" notes.

But still, this isn't something i am going to dig up in a random chat log - because if you're able to find / search for it there, chances are you are pretty close to the solution anyways...

[greatgib]

You are thinking of a professional dev context. But it is not the same thing for everyday discussions with friends.

A lot of things can look not useful and common at the current time, but have a lot of values in the future. But you can't document every step of your life.

For example, imagine that some friend tell you that his brother is currently working in Singapore and that everything goes well for him and all. But so far you have no relation to Singapore and don't travel so much.

Then 1 year later, you will unexpectedly be sent to Singapore for work and you would highly appreciate a contact there. At that point you remember that the brother of someone is there, but who was it?

You just have to search for 'singapore' in Telegram and you can get easily the reply to your question and so recontact the relevant friend.

Same thing when you are suddenly thinking about buying a Xiaomi phone, and you are wondering who was the friend that told you that he bought one 6 months ago to get his review.

[Aerroon]

Sure, but wouldn't you want to have control over these backups yourself? Not only do you get increased privacy from it, you also won't be in for a nasty surprise when the service decides to remove old logs/stop doing business.

[ximeng]

Of course you want to have control. So why does whatsapp and others do their best to prevent this?

[greatgib]

So that explains why chat history has value in itself without just storing outside the important info on a given moment.

But sure, the best thing to deal with that is to be able to 'backup/export' your history and also being able open/import it in a usable form.

Whatsapp mostly fails on both topics. You can't easily backup, otherwise it would be stored in clear in google drive, in an area that is not even accessible to you.

And then it is a sqlite db with proprietary format for fields, so so far nothing can display it properly offline.

For telegram, they have a good export/backup feature.

I don't know of anytool that would allow to browse your history nicely when loaded offline from backups, but as the format is open, that should be doable.

[Erlich_Bachman]

An average user doesn't commonly want to have control over anything themselves :P.

[joe-collins]

I disagree. They'd love to have control, but that control requires tech sophistication that none of the current tooling adequately elides.

[beagle3]

They surely love to have the possibility (and illusion) of control, they don't actually care much for the control itself.

There are numerous marketing studies that show people are most content when choices are made for them (e.g. in getting a new washing machine), as long as they know (or at least believe) they could have made another choice if they wanted to.