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Quickly searching your chat history, going through all your contacts and group chats, 8 years back, without the need to downloading all that history to your dev

Quickly searching your chat history, going through all your contacts and group chats, 8 years back, without the need to downloading all that history to your device and building a search index first is a killer feature. Wouldn't it be impossible to implement without trusting the server with plaintext?

Aachen 6y ago
I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everything since the dawn of time. I'm not a big fan of this one.
- socksy 6y ago
  Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone has come in handy a huge number of times For this reason alone, I can't really see myself switching to an amnesiac client... not unless something else came along that has the ease of use of making all this accessible for me.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    That's not what I'm saying at all? (Edit: ah maybe I understand the confusion. I meant "to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time" literally the way I wrote it, so if you give it a little while to download history and decrypt it upon first use then it can work the way you want from then on. /edit) Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either. There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.

Aachen 6y ago

I wouldn't mind not having that feature of searching so far back instantly on a new device. How often do you login to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time? I get that it's nice but... is that necessary? There are various solutions to the problem of storing and searching history with different trade-offs. One of them is having the server store and be able to read everything since the dawn of time. I'm not a big fan of this one.

socksy 6y ago
Communicating with the majority of my friends through telegram, and having access to the records of all of our conversations, has revolutionised my usage with computing. I use the "saved messages" (previously messaging yourself) to act as an append only log of info I need to search, and unlike emailing myself the UX is actually good. Search is extremely fast, and the fact I can see all the photos I ever sent someone has come in handy a huge number of times For this reason alone, I can't really see myself switching to an amnesiac client... not unless something else came along that has the ease of use of making all this accessible for me.
- Aachen 6y ago
  That's not what I'm saying at all? (Edit: ah maybe I understand the confusion. I meant "to a new device and want to immediately instantly search back to the beginning of time" literally the way I wrote it, so if you give it a little while to download history and decrypt it upon first use then it can work the way you want from then on. /edit) Look at Wire, I can instantly search for arbitrary parts of words (no indexing going on as far as I can tell) and it returns results somewhere between instantly and a second or two depending on how far down the thousands upon thousands of messages the result is. It's end to end encrypted and doesn't use any homomorpic encryption magic (not sure if that's production-ready yet, but if it is, they don't use it here). It's all local and in a browser at that, no need for some special optimized C code either. There are definitely solutions here that support exactly what you want without requiring plaintext server access. We just need to use them.