That's a strawman and you know it. I'm not going to necessarily concur's OP's point, but it's inarguable given MSFT's last half decade the positive stewardship Nadella has done.
Wouldn't it be more damaging if the authorities are able to sync and recover the chat logs (they had time wipe the logs)?
If they are able to take the journalist's sim card which is linked to their Signal account and then are able to recover the chat logs the journalist would be done for.
Of course the supposed journalist we're speaking of is already in a bad spot if they're interred. However, they might have plausible deniability with respect to their phone if there's no compromising chat logs to recover.
To your point about exporting, it would be nice. Ultimately, why can't we have both worlds by way of toggling the function?
Interesting, I always saw this as a deliberate feature aligned with what I first came across Signal for (sensitive communications between trusted parties that may need wiping at a moment's notice). If a journo reporting in a less than hospitable regime had their phone confiscated then they need not worry about their chat logs compromising them.
1. From Marcus Aurelius, "The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts."
There's a lot of toxicity to the comments and opinions within the userbase of reddit. I remove that pool of thought from my lived life and arguably my happiness ought to increase.
2. From Epictetus, "It is the nature of the wise to resist pleasures, but the foolish to be a slave to them." I'll admit do a lot of mindless browsing on reddit. In the past I've used site blockers to block loading reddit for me and I'd have the muscle memory of cmd+t then typing in "old" to load reddit. That all too common doomscroll of post after post, reading comment after comment, still has a pronounced grip on me. It would serve me well to reclaim that time and my unconscious self away from reddit.
This APIgate honestly, in an entirely self-serving way I'm thankful for it. For it to give pause to reflect on my own relationship with reddit.
If they're doing this, old.reddit.com is on the chopping block too, might as well get ahead of that sooner than later.
I know this whole situation is doing a lot of harm and there's a lot hurt over for folks, especially financially, but I'll take this as an opportunity to grow.
Reading the transcripts and listening to the audio and seeing how Reddit is behaving is a fucking wild ride.
I use old.reddit.com on mobile and desktop so I'm not directly effected by these changes aside from the likely steep decline in moderation quality as longstanding mods lose their tools.
I feel compelled to migrate from reddit and only utilize it as a resource for knowledge when it's the only resource for some obscure niche thing or sub-culture. That last statement alone speaks volumes about the danger of centralizing communities as reddit has done.
Maybe a federated internet is back on the table for the future.