Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.
I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.
It's very interesting how different people's definition of "chat" is. The comment above yours (at the time of reading this) says "Chat without history is such a waste", so the opposite of what you are saying.
I think when I was a teenager, I did a lot of chatting online in the sense you are talking about, and I didn't really care about the backlog. But nowadays, there's no room for "chat without log" because it's way too involved. I don't do synchronous chatting anymore at all, basically. After reading your comment, it seems like "chat" in general is just not for me anymore. Asynchronous messaging, however, still has a big part in my life.
> Logging chat is really really expensive in terms of hardware and CPU.
I don't know what expense you're imagining, but my IRC logs took almost zero CPU to acquire and they add up to well under a gigabyte per year before I apply transparent 4x compression.
I don't really understand why people would need to log chat, it doesn't really make sense to me. Chat is meant to be ephemeral, short lived, and not leave trace. Chat is spontaneous.
If users want to leave a trace, they use a database or email.
Discord added threads and forums, and those should be logged, but not channels.