Comment by MomsAVoxell
1 month ago
People being able to organise their lives with their computers has been a thing since the beginning of the personal computer. The filesystems we have were never really the 'best' - just the most viable.
The filesystem UI has been abandoned in favour of newer, better abstractions, such as 'just throw it all at the Cloud and let our analysis software give you a front-end to it, eventually..'
I think users not understanding filesystems isn't really a computing problem, but a literacy one. In some senses, computing becomes the victim of itself.
I would seriously question if “throw it at the cloud” is actually better or if it only became popular because that’s what’s most profitable for companies to push users into using. Local hierarchical storage doesn’t give nearly as many opportunities for rent seeking and data harvesting.
Cloud storage certainly has a convenience factor which is worth considering, but at the same time most people don’t actually need everything available everywhere at all times and only have a handful of files that can intentionally be synced as needed. I really don’t believe that supplanting traditional filesystems with a big bag of data that lives in the cloud is the right answer.
I think the point is that agency of the user over the locality of, and control over their data is based on decisions made by operating system vendors who, having 'given up' on trying to get users to understand the difference between folders and files, has figured out its better to just put everything in the cloud and 'own the tags and other abstractions' which come from a subscription service.
In any case, we see eye to eye on the convenience factor - it is inescapable, the success rate is clear - but we are looking at the edge case of things anyway, no? The future of Apple is an interesting one - we long term users surely can have an opinion. (Hacked my first Apple in 1981, haven't stopped since.)