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Comment by dhsysusbsjsi | Hacker News Reader

Amazingly this is why I’m attracted to Signal and have set all chats to 1 week auto delete.

To me text chats should be ephemeral.

If I want something to stick around for years, send to email.

The blog post is old. Telegram now has auto delete for chats for e2e chats and even manual delete including deleting your partners messages if you want to (on both sides - obviously not in groups). So yes the quick chat that you dont want to be archived anywhere can be deleted quickly and easily. Ofc this does not prevent the other side from storing it in advance but its rather unlikely and It would no longer be possible to proof that yous send these messages. It would just be a text file that could be crafted. So depending on what you sent you have plausible deniability even if a backup exists.

>manual delete including deleting your partners messages if you want to (on both sides - obviously not in groups

You can delete other people's messages for everyone in the chat if you're an admin of the group.

Yes, obviously you can as admin but that's just the admin power. You can also delete/edit your own messages in groups but they will be visible in the admin log for 2 days. So these 2 features are not meant to remove your messages from being stored/archived. Its just the normal moderation feature of group chats.

It's trivial to give everyone in a group admin rights with only the permission to delete messages.

You can also delete all messages in a group from a specific user in one action.

no, its not. you can not do that there is an admin limit 20 iirc

Even email is not permanent. There was a discussion a few months ago on HN where people were complaining that very old attachments just don't load up in Gmail, because they are not backed up on the servers.

There's a difference between email not being permanent and gmail not being permanent.

Logically speaking, my sentence is correct.

I don't have such a distrust for the people I talk to that this is desirable. I find it pretty cool to scroll through old history and remember what we were up to years ago.

Or better copy that to your notes- icloud/OneNote.

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