There's no easy way to automate/schedule this, and you have to do it one conversation at a time. Long-running multiyear conversations produce unwieldy multi-MB

There's no easy way to automate/schedule this, and you have to do it one conversation at a time. Long-running multiyear conversations produce unwieldy multi-MB files. They're not even doing the bare minimum to make data portable, as I see it. I try to hold on to all digital communications with people I know (as opposed to service providers/professional interactions/strangers on the internet), and preserve it on my own hardware in portable formats. The idea is to have the digital equivelant of the box in the attic full of letters. Maybe that record will be interesting to me in a few decades, or to my descendants - or maybe not, which is fine too. But either way it would be a damn shame if we all collectively lost the "boxes of letters in the attic" to digitization, and these proprietary platforms aren't helping.