Selfhosted

And even that is not for the masses. It's good, it's for the medium savvy folks, but it will never be for my wife - or for my mother!

I suppose that that's an "appliance-like computer" though I was thinking more of general-purpose hardware that takes software modules.

Like, think of how you install a game on a console. Maybe you set up your account at the beginning and plonk in a wireless password, but beyond that, there's no further essential configuration for the thing to work. Same kind of idea. You get box, do initial minimal setup. After that, you install software modules, and they have no more configuration involved.

If more configuration is required, then it's just not going to be something sufficiently accessible for everyone to use.

That's probably not what the typical user on this community is looking for, but I think that that's probably what would be required if one wants everyone in the public to be able to self-host.

I have not. I've only just started exploring self hosting and am quite a novice. Thanks for the lead!

Valid, and I do help where I can (check my history if you care). This post just tweaked my twee radar, to which I generally respond, gently, "learn to think for yourself", parental pattern I guess.

That makes sense. I think the reason why they're not represented as files is pretty simple. Data integrity. If you want to get the comments you just query the table and as long as the DB schema is what you expect then it'll work just fine and you don't have to validate that the data hasn't been corrupted (you don't have to check that a column exists for example). But with files, every single file you need to parse and validate because another application could have screwed them up. It's certainly possible to build this, it might be slower but computers are pretty fast these days, but it would require more work to develop to solve the problem that the database solves for you.

That's true, any apps/services that use a database instead of files are more problematic. But then as you have done, you could build your own tooling to accomplish it. That's quite a bit of effort, so it would have to be worth it for you.

I too like having file access whenever possible and prioritize it, for instance on the notes and wiki apps that I use like minimalist web notepad and dokuwiki... it's nice to have access to the files directly. And similarly Immich didn't have a good way to use your own directory structure for quite a while so I didn't use it and instead I used PhotoPrism, but now there is a way to make that work with Immich. It took a bit more effort where I do the actual syncing of my phone's photos with syncthing, and then have a cronjob running an immich --import to import them into Immich, but it works... and I'm happier because I get to maintain my existing directory structure of files.

Definitely talking about linked notes. Obsidian is far from the first or only player in the space. Logseq is out there for the FOSS diehards. I actually very much prefer the Logseq paradigm but struggled with performance issues on my machines.

If you do not teach proprietary software un schools, you will hobble your students' job hunting potential. We should ALSO teach open source alternatives, and teach the idea that there are functional alternatives, but a student who has never used the major apps isn't getting their resume even looked at by a human.