The issue with Signal that annoys me most is the complete lack of any meaningful backup/export on iOS. I lost my entire chat history when I got a new phone because their bizarre "proximity based" solution failed.
At the other side there is Telegram, where the conversation are saved on the cloud, which is great, but everyone can delete or edit a message even years after it was sent! And thus even on Telegram you need backups (with is inconvenient, but can be avoided with a script that exports all your conversation scheduled to run every once in a while)
I would actually use Signal (or whatever other application) if they would have a simple way to export and also import messages. Best thing would obviously be to make a standard interoperable, at least shared by open source applications, like is done with the mailbox format for emails, so you can take your chat, export them, and import them on another system if you want to migrate from one to another.
Not trolling, honestly curious :-)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
Maybe I should invest in a shredder.
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.
Fairer analogy: If you could search transcripts of your IRL conversations at no additional cost (no notetaking), would you?
I think most people would say yes.
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.
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.
Some people are nostalgic and find great comfort in something like a chat history or a photo album (sometimes they're almost one and the same)
Nobody really needs it. Arguably it might be a burden or an impediment to growth.
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.
What made it more irritating was that you only get one "phone detection" attempt per account transfer process, and you're rate-limited on the server side, so I got soft-banned for 24 hours after several attempts.
Enabling a backup on iOS, even if buried in advanced settings, that lets me export an encrypted .zip (for example, similar to Android) to my internal storage via the Files app would be tremendous. As it stands, I lost a very large amount of message history when an old iPhone broke.
I totally understand your reasons for not enabling iCloud backup, but why not a local encrypted backup via the Files app, just like Android?
Even if you feel this goes against your ethos, though I do not understand why that would only apply to iOS, it would be far better to go through a few warning messages and back up my messages than to lose years of conversations with a friend or partner who passed away. There’s hundreds upon hundreds of anecdotal stories where people value this or were burned by Signal on iOS, so clearly it is important to a large part of your existing and also potential userbase.
(I had the same issue migrating from an iPhone SE to an iPhone 12 mini.)
At worst a backup from Signal should only be your messages and at best it should not exist. Signal is designed for secure communication not archiving communications you wish to be secure. If you want a texting app try Telegram or something more focused on user experience vs secure communication.