@Eden@weirder.earth i would argue this is the same question as “what would the internet look like without URLs” and would point to the efforts of companies like Google and Safari to deemphasize the URL bar in favour of things like search or AI prediction…

i don’t think that trend has been entirely benign. URLs are an important part of web architecture, and making it harder for people to see and understand them has the consequence of also making it harder for people to build and host their own websites. it increases platform reliance and dependency and removes the freedom of people to navigate to resources without an intermediary.

so too with filesystems. a filesystem-less approach works great if you are comfortable being dependent on a specific operating system or app, but—especially since no two operating systems seem likely to implement it the same way—ultimately is likely to increase platform lockin and increase the barrier to entry to core technologies like a terminal, version control, compilers, etc which are necessary for people to actually develop their own tools for solving problems. it also makes a lot of assumptions about the shape of data (self-contained with no external dependencies) which does not scale to many disciplines.

i don't particularly care if people have their music organized by artist and track (lol as if people have actual music files downloaded to their computer anymore) or simply thrown in a giant folder with different views based on metadata. well, i think the latter is much more fragile across time and operating systems (“i upgraded my computer and now i can’t find anything!!”) but i’m not bothered by people accepting that risk. but there are so many fields of study where having file A reference file B, including the both of them in a zip file, having a folder of external resources, etc are extremely important. and these fields might be small, or specialty, and there just might not exist apps for them yet, or if there are apps they might be expensive, and for something you could do for free with a couple directories.

it’s very lucrative for the makers and sellers of apps, though, obviously, to push people in that direction.