Re:Slack closes account of an Iranian user living in Canada
by u801e on Thursday December 20, 2018 @06:12PM
(#18730100)
For history, it's either local logging or having an always on client you can connect to (like a bouncer), but most people I knew would just switch their client on, chat for a while, and then close it. They didn't really care much about history.
It was pretty much the same thing with newer chat services like ICQ, AIM, MSN messenger, etc. (though I think they started offering offline messages in later versions).
As for mobile, my older Nokia phone had a Symbian IRC/XMPP client that I could use without any issues.
Granted, I have not used IRC for a while, but last time I checked, the story for getting message history was "start a irc client inside a screen session on a server you own". And there were no mobile at all.
(I remember writing a script which exported chat logs from my desktop client to text files available over HTTP... I'd then visit those pages from cell phone to see if I had any more messages. This is not the experience I would wish on anybody)