Bro, relax

What’s even the point of writing anything if it’s just gonna be gone in like a week?

We are all but dust, my friend.

What value are you getting out of deleting them? Are you low on storage or something? Or some sort of minimal living life-in-my-backpack type?

I already gave my reasons. I don’t want a history of my conversations that can be leaked. I enjoy my privacy. And I have no other reasons to keep them. I was just looking for an actual reason to keep these because I just don’t get it. And I guess you’ve got nothing to offer there. Which is fine, I was just trying to understand.

Monetary value isn’t the only kind of value to me I guess.

Implying that the only value I recognize is monetary? Don’t be a dick.

Uhm, anything and everything? Like what “casual bullshit” you were up to or what you were “organising”?

I’m honestly curious and your answer just parroted what I said without explanation. Are you just sitting around reading conversations from months ago for entertainment or something? What value are you getting out of keeping chats from years ago?

So you don’t even wish you could preserve those?

Not in the slightest. For what purpose would I want that? I’m not making a This American Life podcast using my inane conversations.

And why would you not be looking that up months or years down the line?

I use signal for real time communication. Which is mostly casual bullshit or organizing. What exactly would I want to look up beyond say a week’s time? In-person and phone conversations fade away all the same.

Why would you want to trash it?

Because I don’t want someone going over long-term records of my chats if my devices are ever compromised. I consider those conversations private and would rather they were forgotten than leaked.

Well, CISA will probably be gone next month so no more need to worry about this.

If you don’t have adversaries then why not use SMS? Though this just ends up with the tired old “if you have nothing to hide” argument that I’m not really interested in repeating.

Those examples also don’t sound like things you’ll need to look up months or years down the line, either. So why not just let them fade away?

No records means an adversary can’t pull off an entire lifetime of communication history if a device is compromised. Signal is not the medium in which I’m interested in keeping records.

I use disappearing messages no longer than a week for all my Signal chats. Pretty surprised everyone’s out here keeping long records over this medium.