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by kitsunesoba 1387 days ago
Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

When you’re knee deep in conversation with someone you’re probably not going to say, “oh hey we should switch to email so we can keep a record of this”. It might not even occur to you that the conversation could ever be of value.

There’s been several occasions when my life has been made much more easy for having been able to dig up some old message in iMessage, Telegram, etc from as far back as multiple years ago sometimes because the way things played out the pertinent info didn’t exist anywhere else simply because nobody involved could’ve ever guessed it had any importance.
1 comments
zelphirkalt 1387 days ago
> Signal operates on the idea that anything sent through chat is ephemeral and not worth keeping, which just doesn’t work in practice in my experience.

Why do you think that? Did you lose any messages? 'cause I can scroll back months and still see all my messages there. Never noticed any loss.

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kitsunesoba 1387 days ago
As mentioned in parent comment:

> Signal does not care about users and prevents backups on iOS. Lose your device or delete the app due to some issues and reinstall? All your chats are gone!

Switching out devices is something that happens often enough for many users that transferring history should not be an ordeal. Even the most careful users will occasionally break their phones, and sometimes people need to switch platforms for whatever reason.

WhatsApp suffers from this issue too, at least when trying to migrate histories between platforms.

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em-bee 1387 days ago
just to add, telegram can NOT transfer or back up E2E encrypted chats either. unencrypted chats transfer because they are saved on the telegram server.

i think deltachat is possibly the only one that can transfer encrypted messages because you can copy the encryption keys and the messages are just mails, easy to copy (and usually stored on your mail server too)

i don't know how matrix handles this, but from the way verification works there, i am not confident.

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lhoff 1387 days ago
Signal can do that. Both on Android and iOS. What it can't do on iOS is to create regular Backups (which it can on Android).

https://support.signal.org/hc/en-us/articles/360007059752-Ba...

I think it has something to do that Signal won't trust iCloud as Backup target.

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