I, like many people, "hoard" messages. I only try to delete specific sensitive things and spam, but otherwise, I like having a complete message history. Some of my oldest messages go back 15+ years.
From a privacy, security, and usability standpoint, I agree that deleting them would be better and "easier." But, I have a low threat model and I consider my message history to be as sentimentally important as photos. I also do sometimes search for things similar to how I search my old emails, which has saved my butt more than once.
Unfortunately, my backups are becoming too big, too unorganized, and I worry constantly that I may lose them due to software changes or unreliable backups. My messages, like many people, are now split across several messaging platforms as well as different threads in each app for each random group combination and changes in contact phone numbers or accounts. Fear of losing my message history also forces vendor lock-in or prevents me from uninstalling/deleting message services I no longer use. I would love to become messenger and device agnostic.
My collection of apps and services with history include:
- Google Messages
- iMessage (from before i moved to Android years ago. It's saved to Apple cloud (I think) and as unreadable files I exported from iTunes. I did move these to Android years ago via isms2droid, but it was an imperfect conversion, destroying group threads and some message content, which is why I haven't deleted the originals).
- Facebook Messenger
- WhatsApp
- Signal
- Google Voice
- GroupMe
- Instagram DMs
- LinkedIn DMs
- Twitter/X DMs
I would much prefer a way to centralize all of my messages into an open standard that I have control over and can move around as I please, ideally being able to easily browse it on both mobile and desktop. I have no idea what that standard is or what it should be though. I'd want the viewing experience to be similar in quality to what I would get in an actual messaging app (so not just a .TXT file that you can barely make sense of who is saying what) nor just an unreadable XML/JSON file. It would have to support search, ideally in-line media, threads, the ability to export/convert or at least print to pdf, the ability to append more messages, and be stable enough to handle a lifetime more of future messages.
Has anyone attempted this? For those that care about retaining message history, what's your archiving strategy?