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I am on Telegram you can delete a conversation, there should be a pop up and a query asking if you want it deleted for the person whom you are speaking with, if you leave the box unticked it will only delete it for you but the whole conversation will be available for the other person. With all that said, if a person is getting "offended" over a deleted conversation then the problem lies with that person.
Correct, yes. Sometimes my paranoia leads me to delete it for the other person too, just because I get nervous about others keeping receipts on me, but I'm trying to get over this.
"Offensive" isn't the word I'd use, but I can see how I might feel it was rude.
To be frank, I really really wish I *did* have transcripts of my conversations with friends even from in-person. I have a garbage memory and it's really embarrassing that I blithely start retelling stories to the same person -- or refer to something major in my life that they never knew about! Just using encrypted messaging where I can't neatly search the full history already hampers my habit of trying to check if I've said something before. I know most people wouldn't, but....
I can't imagine blocking someone if they cleared a message archive, but I would expect it to be mentioned -- like "ah, nothing's up, I'm just tidying my message histories" or "oh dang, sorry, hit that by accident".
I get this. I think I'm beginning to come around on the issue but yeah, I've apologized and explained to several people who proceeded to block me.
It's a feature of Telegram, so it's clearly intended to be voluntarily ephemeral from both sides. On the one hand, I like having archives of conversations to look back on (just in case), but on the other hand...if they blocked you over something this inconsequential, I don't think their conversation was worth maintaining, anyway.
I think the expectations are different for IM vs in-person spoken conversation. Also, when you deleted the conversation, you probably deleted it for the other person, too—and I wouldn’t be surprised if Telegram didn’t make it easy to export conversations as plain text for archival.
You actually can export conversations pretty easily. I used to use Telegram for years doing textual roleplaying with a friend, and I discovered that I could export our chat history from the desktop client, which meant I had an archive of all the stuff we wrote together for eventual cleaning/looking back on/publishing.
I get that. The question is - why does it bother people to not have an archive of our conversations? That's kinda creepy imho.
As a datahoarder, I think it's neat having an archive of my entire life (provided I have complete control over this archive and it's not in the hands of any FAANG or something).
As a social thing, I don't see it as creepy, I see it as wanting to preserve the history of a relationship. It's the same reason why we save written letters from loved ones.
I could see that with emails. Emails are different and more analogous to a letter. IMs are more like an in-person conversation. I guess it's not super creepy or anything, but I legitimately, in good faith, don't see why clearing a conversation is so offensive to so many people.
I still have chat logs from when my wife and I courted between 2000 and 2004, along with our emails. You might think it's creepy, but those archives are part of our history. We can read through them together and remember when we were young and in love despite being on opposite sides of the planet.