From something I wrote in 2021 [0] and based on my experience working on a "browser-based OS" in 2013: What we need is to have a device-transparent way to

From something I wrote in 2021 [0] and based on my experience working on a "browser-based OS" in 2013: What we need is to have a device-transparent way to see our *data*. We got so used to the idea that web applications let us work from "dumb terminals" that we failed to realize that *there is no such thing as a dumb terminal anymore*. With multi-core smartphones, many of them with 4, 8, 12, 16GB of RAM; it's not too hard to notice that the actual bottlenecks in mobile devices are battery life and (intermittent and still relatively expensive) network connectivity. These are problems that can be solved by appropriate data synchronization, not by removing the data from the edge. One of the early jokes about web2.0 was that to have a successful company you should take an Unix utility and turn it into a web app. This generation of open source developers are reacting to this by looking at successful companies and building "self-hosted" versions of these web apps. What they didn't seem to realize is that **we don't need them**. The utlities and the applications still work just fine, we just need to manage the data and how to sync between our mobile/edge devices and our main data storage. If you are an open source developer and you are thinking of creating a web app, do us all a favor and ask yourself first: do I need to create yet-another silo or can I solve this with Syncthing? [0]: https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clouds/ https://raphael.lullis.net/thinking-heads-are-not-in-the-clo...