title: A Social Filesystem
author: u/fagnerbrack
contenttype: redditpost
publication: r/programming
published: 2026-02-28T07:11:31+00:00
sourceurl: https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1rgw211/asocial_filesystem/
word_count: 330
Link: https://overreacted.io/a-social-filesystem/
Score: 102 | Comments: 34 | Subreddit: r/programming
Top Comments
u/elmuerte (50 pts):
Why not use URIs for "namespaces"? They were created exactly for that, and they work quite well. It has been used in a previous experiment for a social filesystem.
u/mines-a-pint (25 pts):
This basically reinvents RDF.
In RDF each post would be just a set of triples: a ‘isA’ triple that identifies the post uniquely by IRI (a more general type of URL), a ‘hasContent’ triple that associates the text or other content, a ‘authoredBy’ triple that associates the author (another entity defined by triple, with a unique IRI), a triple that associates the timestamp etc.
The triples can be spread across one file, or many, each is just basically a line of text. But ultimately they add up to a knowledge graph.
Likes are just additional triples that identify who liked the post. Reposts are triples that identify who reposted the post, and when.
It’s all additive, so if I like a post 6 months after it gets posted, it just adds to the total graph of information about that post.
The actual representation of triples doesn’t matter, use JSON if you insist, but there are several file formats already.
All this work was done decades ago, but few people really understood the point: it never really escaped academia.
Ironically the point was to have machine readable content, with accurate reasoning, something we’re now fudging, poorly, with LLMs.
u/captainobvioushere (6 pts):
I wish I wasn't lazy, so then I could post that XKCD comic about standards.
u/mattsowa (5 pts):
Good read. Though I'm surprised the article doesn't draw parallels to relational databases when talking about normalized data structures and schemas.
u/[deleted] (7 pts):
I really like this idea, reminds me of how linux also abstracts certain handles and hardware / os information through files.
I'm putting some effort into developing a distributed, zero trust, mutable file system. I can only imagine how cool it would be to have these open decentralized databases for everything.
You own your files, others seed them for high availability.
I know it's very similar to the torrent protocol, but mutable and focused on a highly available and mutable system.