> Depends on the person, I suppose?

Probably. In my case long-term memory seems to be really strong down male side of my family so when I read my old stuff from 20+ years ago I remember it and know it was me, just a little different like 'damn, we don't wear clothes like that anymore' when you look at old pictures. The styles/culture/times change you are in and so you adapt to them, but you are still you. I hear this commonly though that some people don't feel like the old them is same person at all.

For me: I have felt a continual sense of self since around kindergarten, before that memory is a little episodic (my earliest is going to hospital to visit my mom and sister after she was born, when I was age 2) but I feel the same 'me' in memories from kindergarten til now over 30 years later. I also do stuff like pick up and start reading a book, put it down, and then go back and finish from where I left off 3-4 years later. I've met a few other people that do that as well, but it's a little uncommon I think?

On the flip side my working memory has always been really bad. My attachment to memory blanks under stress, some people will relate in things like public speaking. I remember in high school forgetting entire marching band drill one time and having to improvise because I stress blanked. The memory is there when this happens it's like it stops streaming to RAM, intuition takes over based on what it sees not what is known.

What is incredibly useful, and this I always felt is for personal writing only (diary/journal)... writing allows for capturing a state of your own thinking/feelings at a time. I would often write to myself when major events happened (good or bad) and then later on I could interpret from the strong feelings what I was going through and see if I handled them or could handle them better. You don't need editing passes for this, it should capture your raw state. Probably good to do this if your memories fade as well, but I don't know. I will probably burn some of my old writing, things that have served their purpose. Apparently it makes you feel relieved doing it and some cultures have this concept.

Officially it supports linking other devices like their desktop app as a secondary. I currently use this to link into signal-mautrix on my matrix homeserver. This way I can access signal from multiple phones and multiple computers using a matrix client instead.

I mean we’re there for Signal. The parts that suck still are regarding access/retention of old messages which is an area Matrix is ironically slightly better about. But Signal we don’t need to think about verification, at worst it says this asshole has a new identity and then I have to tell them I’ve reset my iPhone for the 4th time this week…

Normal users do find retention important even if privacy/security minded users find value in ephemerality.

But it also asks for recovery key and complains about it being out of sync until entered even if you do the verification step! Entirely possible to only get a partial recovery of messages until this is entered.

I’m a server admin and I still couldn’t tell you why when I sign new endpoints in and verify for cross-signing it still also asks me for a recovery key.

For encrypted search on desktop it has to fetch batches of messages and this is configurable in settings. It just had a number? what is that? how large the batch is, how many ms? no clue! good thing we can’t do encrypted search on mobile/web.