💾 Archived View for jsreed5.org › log › 2021 › 202103 › 20210308-flat-files.gmi captured on 2023-12-28 at 15:53:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-12-04)
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While I spend my time falling down the gopherhole and immersing myself in a more simple, straightforward Internet, my wife is an active user of Twitter, Reddit and Spotify. This is fine, but it means that when she comes across a funny video or catchy song she wants to show me, she sends me a link to the service she found it on. I disable JavaScript and many other modern "features" in my web browsers, both on mobile and desktop, which makes navigating such sites quite a pain.
I've always preferred obtaining, consuming and sharing content via flat files. That's one reason why Gopher appeals to me so much. But even without Gopher, it's still easy to use web servers to serve flat files, and it's easy for local programs to store files in a temporary directory and load them from there. Flat files are reproducible, can be accessed and shared offline, can be checksummed and protected from data rot, and are immune to removal due to licensing or copyright changes. Flat files are certainly not trouble-free, but they've worked for computing systems for decades, and they'll continue to work in the future.
As files have grown bigger over the years--music and videos are rendered in higher quality, documents become more feature-rich, and video games become more powerful--storage capacity in personal computing devices has grown with them. I find it ironic, then, that the sharing of flat files has slowed immensely in casual computing, replaced with streaming services and API-served content. The storage space that was meant to save flat files is now being taken up by enormous mobile apps and programs that don't actually store anything on our machines while silently collecting information about us to sell to advertisers.
With the erosion of local storage of files comes the erosion of digital property rights. Tech companies want to own everything we make because they can then sell it, license it, and restrict access to it. I have no interest in adding to the bulk of their content, essentially earning money for them for free, especially when my rights and requests aren't being honored in kind.
When my wife sends me links, I use third-party tools to download videos and pictures, thereby converting them into flat files. youtube-dl is a godsend.
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[Last updated: 2021-10-28]