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Comment by parliament32 | Hacker News Reader

Why would you want this? You don't save history for other types of chats, like in person conversations or phone calls (even though you could, with your phone recording in your pocket or call recorder apps). If something important comes up, like an address or recipe, copy/paste it into your notes app. Otherwise set your messages to expire after a month and be done with it.

I used to be a message-hoarder too, but I recently realized it was all utterly useless and the cost of maintaining and transferring that history around everywhere wasn't worth the twice-a-year I actually wanted to search for something.

Signal isn't email.

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> Why would you want this?

Because I have repeatedly dug out useful information from chats, days, weeks, months, or years later.

> If something important comes up, like an address or recipe, copy/paste it into your notes app.

You're assuming that 1) you know what's important at the time, rather than realizing later, and 2) you want to take the time, at the time, to figure out somewhere to file it.

> I used to be a message-hoarder too, but I recently realized it was all utterly useless

That's your choice, but that doesn't make it the right choice for everyone. Your preferences are not universal. (And descriptions like "hoarder" deride the choices of others.)

> Signal isn't email.

People advocate using Signal in place of email, for security.

I cannot advocate Signal to anyone I know until it learns to treat user data as incredibly valuable and irreplaceable.

If people want to mark their messages as transient, or even mark all their messages as transient, so be it; that's their choice. But if a message is not marked as transient, it must be possible to securely and easily preserve that message for longer than the lifetime of any one device.

How about multimedia? Photos, videos? Docs that I may not wish to read now but have available at a later date if needed? Most of those I would rather leave 'archived' in context than pick and choose which to download to device storage and then have to further sort and annotate.

Why would I want you to decide for me if I should keep my messages or not?

> You don't save history for other types of chats, like in person conversations or phone calls

There are more than a few conversations I would absolutely love to be able to revisit, but I can't. Like those small, ordinary moments with my Grandma, of which I remember just very little, I didn't think much of them at the time. With those people I've lost who did leave chatlogs, they have been helpful at times.

I find it also can be very insightful to be able to drop into ten-years-ago me's life, just to find how much I've changed in some respects – or how little. It's a great source of self-reflection for me.

If keeping chat logs is something you personally don't value, that's great, you do you. But keep in mind that people are wildly different and lots will have needs, preferences and principles that are the opposite of yours, and just as valid.

that's why I love Matrix

Exactly. Keeping message history is a liability. There is no need to keep all old messages beyond one week. If there is something specific worth saving, there are apps for taking/pasting notes.

I can think of many reasons full message history is valuable.

- a friend says something that you don’t realise is important until months later and need to reference

- a friend or partner dies and you wish to revisit old times by reading your messages

- a couple wish to nostalgically re-read random conversations from their early time together

- a group chat for work or students shares valuable resources that you wish to reference, but is impractical to make copies of the dozens of messages

- legal reasons if somebody accused you of saying or doing something you did not do

- you’re going to an address (for example) that somebody sent you a week prior, but you forgot to save it

People are forgetful, people are emotional and nostalgic, and people are argumentative. All very good reasons for a chat history. Disappearing messages are simply always opt-in precisely because most people do not want it.

I'm sympathetic to all of these, but I do remind myself that sentimental reasoning is probably as close to diametrically opposed to Signal's goals as you could be.

> There is no need to keep all old messages beyond one week.

Based on what use case? Many times I searched old personal and group chats, to find what I wanted in a message from 1 year before

Well for example here Whatsapp is the main communication medium with your landlord. It's useful to keep that full communication history in case any disagreement comes up.

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