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Comment by xiaomai | Hacker News Reader

I think not having it disappear by default is reasonable. My biggest complaint about signal is how hard it is to preserve history (backing up / transferring to new devices). I think the normal expectation is that your data is not going to automatically disappear unless you ask it to.

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As someone that doesn't fret with the saving history part I'm curious why people save their texts and back them up. Honestly it is a bit creepy to me. I can understand saving special texts (especially for a short time period) but it seems weird to me that people want to save texts from a year ago that talk about what I had for breakfast. There's something I'm not getting here, can someone enlighten me? Like I've never searched my texts for something that is more than a few weeks old. Any further back than that and I just directly ask the person (it is way faster).

People drift apart or even die.

One reason may be that some people are hoarders. It's in our genes, like squirrels packing away nuts for the winter.

Another may be that texts are like emails for some people, and some people have reason to save important emails. I know a real estate agent that does a ton of stuff via text.

I delete texts after I process them. If I get a pic I want to keep I save it and back it up on the computer. I don't really save emails, either (I empty my trash every couple of months)

EDIT: added email comparison

I'm not sure the email comparison is good. We usually do a lot of business via email. So it makes sense to have records. Whereas texting we are just casually having conversations. Most people don't use it for business, though I'm sure some do.

I do completely understand archiving specific texts (sorry if this wasn't clear in my original statement), but the mass saving is weird to me. It feels akin to having a conversation with my friend and them just pulling out a microphone and recording our conversation. And then when asking why the answer is "for my records" or "it's my data". And I'm accused of being the weird one. I guess I just fundamentally don't understand.

Saving history doesn't have to mean saving every message.

I get that. I completely understand saving special messages. But the conventional method is saving everything, not selective saving. You backup your entire chat history, not snippets. That's what I don't understand.

What apps have selective saving?

Gmail

Most people don't use Gmail for text messages. Ironically Gmail normalized archiving all email.

That's kinda my point. Texting generally isn't used for business purposes either.

I do think saving specific messages is the best solution. But you can even see in this thread that people compare Signal (i.e. text) to physical mail or email and that's why saving all messages is "normal." So... if we're mixing that paradigm then I think gmail is an acceptable answer to the question.

You're getting the responses you're getting because you called them creepy. Other people would be happy to save selectively if apps supported it. No one is going to switch to Gmail just for that.

Saving everything IS creepy. Selectively saving is a normal want. And I feel like I've been clear in this distinction from the start. If people are offended by that, well I'm not too concerned. They need to look at how their behavior is weird to others.

But the thing that gets me is that that kind of justification is more about "but it is normal because we've been doing x for a long time." But email and texting isn't that old. It is very new to the world. Even text being the primary form of communication is extremely new. We're all still trying to this all out too.

You often don't know (or want to have to think about) what message is "special" at the time. I've gotten useful value from searching years-old email, and years-old text messages. Text messages are small and easy to save, and I expect device storage to grow far faster than the size of every text I've ever sent or received.

I've had this for email but never for text messages. But the emails I've had this utility for were also business related stuff. But I do not think of mail/email as a means of chatting.

I save a history of comments with a few contacts simply because new share a lot of links or references, so it's valuable to have that history. Most conversations don't matter but l search for a conversation that happened two years ago on a regular basis. And quite frankly it might be faster to ask the person again, it's also a way to annoy the hell out of them

> Like I've never searched my texts for something that is more than a few weeks old.

I have. In fact, over time I have searched my texts at least a dozen times for stuff that happened years ago. It might be links/references that I'm looking for or answers to questions like "When did Paul and I go to X?" and "When exactly did I meet Sara?" in which case Paul and Sara often don't remember the answer, either. Also, I have a dozen or so friends & acquaintances that I only get in touch with about once a year (mostly because they're living on the other end of the world) and, in this case, knowing what we last chatted about is a tremendous help in picking up the conversation where we left off. (Suddenly I magically "remember" that they told me they had started a new job.)

So you can answer questions like:

"Hey, remember when we went to $ski_resort last spring? What week was that in, the conditions were great!"

"Hey, did you request vacation time for next week half a year ago? $employer says he doesn't remember you asking that.."

"Hey, since grandma passed away we need to contact her brokerage.. she told you what it was when she signed up a few years ago, right?"

"Hey, you remember the date of our first date, right?"

Being able to search my old text messages is just as, if not more, important than being able to search my old emails.

When was the last time you moved devices? I was able to wirelessly import my entire years old messaging and contact database when I switched iOS devices ~10 months ago. I don't recall if it used NFC, Bluetooth or having to be connected to the same WiFi network but it worked impressively well at the time.

one thing i have done recently that definitely didn't work is syncing history from phone->desktop. i haven't gone phone->phone in at least a couple years though--good to hear that that's working better.

They recently improved it on iOS https://signal.org/blog/ios-device-transfer/

on Android you have to do it manually and its by no means easy or intuitive if you are an everyday user. Whatsapp nails this experience on Android with the back up and transfer capability

> Whatsapp nails this experience on Android with the back up and transfer capability

Note that Whatsapp’s backups are in plaintext and sent to a Google property, while Signal’s backups (even if more cumbersome to set up) are encrypted with a key that only you know.

yes good catch, I forgot to mention that. I wanted to highlight that for the average user being able to backup and move messages to a new device easily is a big plus even if its insecure.

I hope in 2021 Signal can improve their new transfer method by allowing transfers between Android devices or even ( albeit far more difficult) android and ios

But WhatsApp backups are stored unencrypted on Google Drive. So either you have backups or you keep your privacy from Google and Facebook.

The iOS transfer process uses the same technology as AirDrop, what Apple calls Multipeer Connectivity: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/multipeerconnectiv...

The phones create their own ad-hoc Wi-Fi network, similar to Wi-Fi Direct.

I think the problem is losing access to a phone. For example because it gets dropped or stolen.

The lack of good message backups on iOS makes me hesitant to recommend Signal more.

At least on Signal for Android, you can make all the periodic backups of your Signal messages that you want: just be sure to copy the most recent backup file from your phone to another computer, and keep the encryption key (i.e. the sequence of numbers that Signal generates for you) written down somewhere. Then, if your phone does get dropped or stolen, you will have only lost messages since your last backup.

Signal for iOS goes out of its way to prevent this.

The Android backups are also to SD card only - you "just" need to manually handle cron jobs to copy off device, "just" make sure you copy of a really long key (you're not allowed to enter yourself) and "just" hope that a year down the road you still find all of those data.

It's a horribly shitty user experience all but most mindful techies.

The issue with Signal is that their developers fundamentally don't value the content of conversations in the way that millions of other people do - people send photos of their loved ones, have meaningful conversations and they fundamentally care about not losing them. Signal developers think that that's all worthless and needs to be destroyed ASAP.

I never understand this logic. You want end-to-end encryption, which entails building a complex, clever mousetrap so that only the device in your hands is capable of viewing the messages you receive, AND you want to back them up so that they can be retrieved later on a different device that was not part of the trusted setup?? If the backup is a priority, perhaps end-to-end encryption is not suited to your use case.

And no, it's not simple at all to provide this technology in a meaningful way that is both as secure as you need and as convenient as you want. Nor should it be free if it ever exists.

The Android and desktop versions already do this.

Why shouldn't it be free?

Do they? Where are the encryption keys stored? Are you able to recover your backups if you lose your desktop?

Desktop stores the key on disk already. Android shows a key you write down.

Your viewpoint leaves out a larger number of people who want security (as recommended by experts) and convenience without having to understand all the nuances or complexities involved in a solution. Such a description also makes it very hard to recommend Signal to lay people because they don’t know or care much about security but do want convenience. If Signal is meant to be for a small echo chamber group to use, this is fine. If not, the convenience aspect cannot, and should not, be ignored to increase adoption.

I have the opposite problem where I can't turn disappearing messages on by default. Every time I create a new conversation I have to manually set messages to disappear after a week which I often forget to do.

I agree with both of you. It should be off by default, but it should notify users initially and periodically about the benefits of turning it on so they are aware of it.

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