Can I ask why are you so attached to your message history? I recently lost my entire WhatsApp history and it hasn’t made any difference in my life to be honest.
Comment on Signal – an ethical replacement for WhatsApp
rfr_Foglia@feddit.it 1 day agoI agree and it would be much better if people would use Signal instead of WhatsApp, but I think there’s still one problem.
Due to how messaging platforms work, every time you switch you lose pretty much everything (messages, media, etc) This makes switching very hard even for a nerd like me, because if Signal is not “perfect” it means that I will have to switch again at some point and lose everything again.
Plebcouncilman@sh.itjust.works 13 hours ago
lemonuri@lemmy.ml 1 day ago
Thats a problem with silos (where one owner hosts all the servers) in general. You will have to switch the entire ecosystem once the inevitable enshitification sets in. It’s a good idea to switch to something open source and federated (where many different non profit organisations and even self hosting individuals host many different servers). That way you can migrate your history and contacts to another server of necessary but never have to switch the ecosystem again. Xmpp and matrix are the hottest candidates in my opinion, but you can check the messenger matrix that was linked in a comment above to see what suits you best.
rfr_Foglia@feddit.it 1 day ago
Well said, the problem really is that Signal isn’t federated. I’m keeping an eye on Matrix for now.
Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
You can save any media you care about. And Signal can backup your chats if that history is important to you.
rfr_Foglia@feddit.it 1 day ago
Sure, but if I switch from Signal to another potentially better messaging app down the line my chat history will get fragmented
foggenbooty@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I’ve been using Signal for years and my database was getting really bloated with media, attachments, etc but I didn’t want to delete it all. I used this and it’s incredible:
github.com/bepaald/signalbackup-tools
Just make a backup from within signal, copy that backup file to your PC, then run this tool. The commands I used make an HTML webpage that looks just like the signal messenger, along with a way of searching your messages. You can choose different commands to export however you like.
I used:
So while this doesn’t help you move off your current messenger, you don’t have to worry that your data/messages will be lost in Signal.