File Over App: A Philosophy for Digital Longevity

Pinata | Autonomous File Storage

Add file uploads and retrieval in minutes so you can focus on your app —because you’ve got better things to code than infrastructure.

A Social Filesystem — overreacted

Formats over apps.

File over app

If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you...

Rethinking Digital Storage for Community-Based Archives

Over the last few decades, the standard procedure for storing and backing up data has been ‘put it in the cloud.’ Many of us use cloud…

Nothing new under the sun: everything is a file

The Unix revolution was built on a key principle: everything is a file. Now, with the rise of AI Agents, LLMs have access to half a century of file-based arcana. The result? Everything is becoming a file again.

Computer Files Are Going Extinct

Technology services are changing our internet habits

Malleable software: Restoring user agency in a world of locked-down apps

The original promise of personal computing was a new kind of clay. Instead, we got appliances: built far away, sealed, unchangeable. In this essay, we envision malleable software: tools that users can reshape with minimal friction to suit their unique needs.

Resilio Sync | Personal file sync and share powered by P2P

Save and share life’s most important moments—photos, videos, music, PDFs, documents, and more—securely across all your devices.

Personal data storage is an idea whose time has come

Data Ownership as a conversation changes when data resides primarily with people-governed institutions rather than corporations.

Proposal: User Intents for Data Reuse · bluesky-social atproto · Discussion #3617

This is a discussion thread for the User Intents for Data Reuse proposal.

Digital Topology & Economic Power

The autonomous file, once the basic unit of user agency in personal computing, was first hollowed out through proprietary formats and data internalization, then abolished entirely by cloud platforms, relocating control toward incumbents at each stage. Enclosure succeeds not by offering users less, but by bundling genuine capability gains with topological restructuring, so that the user cannot accept the improvement without accepting the new relationship of power.

File Garden

Host your files with decency.

My productivity app is a never-ending .txt file

The biggest transition for me when I started college was learning to get organized. There was a point when I couldn't just remember everything in my head. And having to constantly keep track of things was distracting me from whatever task I was doing at the moment.