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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • Devil’s advocate: what about the posts and comments I’ve made via Lemmy? They could be presented as files (like email). I could read, write and remove them. I could edit my comments with Microsoft Word or ed. I could run some machine learning processing on all my comments in a Docker container using just a bind mount like you mentioned. I could back them up to Backblaze B2 or a USB drive with the same tools.

    But I can’t. They’re in a PostgreSQL database (which I can’t query), accessible via a HTTP API. I’ve actually written a Lemmy API client, then used that to make a read-only file system interface to Lemmy (https://pkg.go.dev/olowe.co/lemmy). Using that file system I’ve written an app to access Lemmy from a weird text editing environment I use (developed at least 30 years before Lemmy was even written!): https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/1035382

    More ideas if you’re interested at https://upspin.io


  • They even have a term for this — local-first software — and point to apps like Obsidian as proof that it can work.

    This touches on something that I’ve been struggling to put into words. I feel like some of the ideas that led to the separation of files and applications to manipulate them have been forgotten.

    There’s also a common misunderstanding that files only exist in blocks on physical devices. But files are more of an interface to data than an actual “thing”. I want to present my files - wherever they may be - to all sorts of different applications which let me interact with them in different ways.

    Only some self-hosted software grants us this portability.