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Why is it so hard to export your own messages out of Discord, Slack, etc?

We have regressed from the open email standard and gone back to these opaque islands of data that do not adhere to any standard.

Slack refused to show me my own messages past a certain age unless I paid up, and eventually deleted them.

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It's hard because they want you to keep paying. Same reason AWS has free ingress and paid egress. The walled gardens are all built like carnivorous plants, the thorns face inwards.

There are tricks to get messages from Slack, though I heard they were changing soon if not already.

A year or so ago I exported all messages from a Slack group I ran and used a Discord bot to recreate the entire dataset including channels and user posts. So we now have our entire history of messages without being blocked by a paywall (Until Discord does the same, and we'll be off to find a new home).

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