- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
They have warned about this before, but it’s still pretty wild to think they’re now removing old DMs (and chats, but it’s not like anyone used those).
Interestingly you can still see them if you take out your data via a request, so they got them in the database still.
I don’t like the other stuff they’re doing but I don’t think this is that unreasonable. They’re not a messaging platform. They’re a heavily organized forum that allows messaging. Deprecating an old messages/chat format and not thinking it’s worth it to try to retroactively migrate over a decade of content when most users won’t care at all isn’t that unreasonable. There’s a scale where, especially with legacy code in play, migrating old data is a serious undertaking that takes serious resources. If it’s not something critical that most people use, you have to evaluate whether it’s worth it.
All of that is true, but they also could’ve said “Hey, we’re deleting these messages in a week, back up anything important, sorry for the short notice” and that would have been A-OK. Some people lost some sentimental messages and weren’t prepared to back them up because there was zero warning that this was happening.
Someone said they’re still part of the GDPR export, you can try that. If it doesn’t work, use a VPN to connect from an EU country.
Are you sure they didn’t give warning? I completely stopped visiting the site when they announced they were taking my app away, but I could have sworn I’ve seen mentions that they were building new chat/messages and that old ones would be gone for a while now. Well before any of the current API stuff.