I totally understand what you mean and I also frequently look up older conversations to enjoy again the in-jokes, banter and actually useful information of my chats.
However to avoid 1) having to manually delete things and 2) accumulating hundreds of megabytes of messages and 3) to not be swamped by months and years of "can you call?", "alright, see you later" and other ultimately meaningless stuff, I have conversations in Signal with my frequent interlocutors set to expire after a month.
To save things, I currently simply screenshot the relevant parts of the conversation or forward them to my "Notes to myself" thingy for later. It's a bit manual, but at least it's simple to remember: what I don't actively save disappears. Screenshots leave out audio messages and gifs (to a certain extend) but it is at least something. (And I just realised that with Signal it's actually possible to download individual audio messages and video so that a later reconstitution is possible if tedious.)
However, what would be great is to indeed have a way to backup messages including stickers, audio, videos etc. in a more high-fidelity way to relive important converations.
Personally all I want is a way to save specific messages. Like my friend recently sent me a recipe. That's nice to save. Everything else I'm fine cutting off at like 500 messages or something. I guess a lot of this saving doesn't bother me because back in the T9ing days you couldn't save many messages and no one batted an eye. I'm surprised at the major paradigm shift, but also most communication happens through text now which is also interesting.
However to avoid 1) having to manually delete things and 2) accumulating hundreds of megabytes of messages and 3) to not be swamped by months and years of "can you call?", "alright, see you later" and other ultimately meaningless stuff, I have conversations in Signal with my frequent interlocutors set to expire after a month.
To save things, I currently simply screenshot the relevant parts of the conversation or forward them to my "Notes to myself" thingy for later. It's a bit manual, but at least it's simple to remember: what I don't actively save disappears. Screenshots leave out audio messages and gifs (to a certain extend) but it is at least something. (And I just realised that with Signal it's actually possible to download individual audio messages and video so that a later reconstitution is possible if tedious.)
However, what would be great is to indeed have a way to backup messages including stickers, audio, videos etc. in a more high-fidelity way to relive important converations.