• toastal
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    6 months ago

    Sorry for clarity. The eventual consistency model is a result of wanting decentralization for Slack/Telegram/Discord’s design of thinking the entire history needs to be saved for chat rather than seen as ephemeral (which allows for better search & resilience, but at a major cost to storage, but also a knock-on effect of folks treating chat as permanent which is why we have huge, cut-off information silos on these chat platforms that the rest of the net can’t index & often trawling the search is difficult so the repeated questions/answers are common since a simple web search doesn’t yield good results). When you take away the concept that all text & attachments need to be seen from origin til the end of time, you would never bother in all the work of cloning the entire history & reassembling it on every server listening to the conversation. …Which is why many chat protocols forgo the more then enough history to keep you up to speed with a conversation & structured forums + feeds used to be the primary way to ask questions & make announcements (where simple programs could parse the data instead of needing gobs of natural language processing for chat soup when it is pulling multiple duties).