I understand that loosing them at an unexpected time can be annoying and a backup is useful, but I personally never had a use for that feature and knowing that it is annoying for someone to keep all my messages around forever is something I consider positive.
I’m switching my social networks to Telegram after Signal burned up its good will focusing on features they want versus what their users want. Do I care if it’s as secure? No, I prefer the convenience and superior UX iMessages and Telegram offers.
Really unfortunate, as it was Signal’s race to lose after their bump in usage and shoutouts from popular folks using it.
It seems to me like Signal has been focusing on making their UX closer to Telegrams. This seems to be what many users want?
Same here - but maybe if doing Business then somebody might want to keep them (e.g. to keep track of whatever your customers told you in the past? Just a guess...).
(btw. I think it's not "loosing" if you don't mean something like "letting them free", but "losing". "losing" vs. "choosing", I kept mixing that up until recently... :P )
What I would like as a feature in Signal is "polls" (e.g. to choose with a few friends to which bar/restaurant to go, when to meet, whatever).
But now unluckily I'm back on Whatsapp as even after having abandoned it, within almost 2 years most of my friends refused to install Signal -> in the end, on 31.Dec.2021, I decided to admit that I failed, and I reinstalled Whatsapp :(
I find text based instant messaging to be shallow and vapid and I have very little interest in them. Texting is best used (for me at least) to coordinate real life plans (I'll be in front of X at Y o'clock) or quick task-oriented notes (Hey babe, can you grab some sliced turkey if you're still at the store). If you want to actually talk to me, call me or let's meet in person.
This attachment to one's messaging archive is IMO a symptom of data hoarding. 99.9% of text conversations won't be interesting in the future because they weren't interesting when they were happening.
That said I do like enjoy the feature where all of the photos from a given conversation are easily accessible.
If I could have backups of entire conversations, I wouldn’t have to export and save every single video and picture being sent with Signal.
On the other side, when I broke up with her I also used the chat history to point out some times she had tried to lie to me. That was a bitter satisfaction I could probably have done without.
Not everything needs to live on forever.
Cheers.
not only do I think it's fine I think it's actually healthy. I think the ability to search and turn over every word said in the past can produce some pretty neurotic and bad behaviors. There's a fun Black Mirror episode about this in one of the earlier seasons.