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

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  • Sorry my comment was really snarky - I apologise. Long day! I’ll do better in the future :)

    There has been criticism of this listicle format. Critics claim they are clickbait and machinated recycling of information/ideas. Listicles seem to exist to just get more ad impressions over entertaining and informing the reader.

    The original article on the original site feels a bit like that. Loads of ads, with just one link to the actual nixos website, mid-sentence, towards the bottom of the article (where the majority of readers never get to).



  • 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.


  • I won’t speak for the OP, but yes it is a fair question about the automatic red-flag. There are characteristics of software described as cloud-native that are considered undesirable by some.

    These could range from things as high level as an objection to how projects are funded, down to things like distaste for code complexity required to support opaque HTTP APIs over standardised protocols.