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folders is inherently a bad idea
(lemmy.sdf.org)
am regularly amazed that we pretend folders are the right way to organise files. They’re entirely arbitrary. Every competent file system ignores them to its best ability. Why can’t I have a file in two folders? Why does one have to be a “reference”? Why can’t I filter for files that exist in 3 folders with X extension?
We’ve been played for absolute fools.
I can't say I disagree, but I am ignorant of what the alternatives would be. A tagged database of files so you can query by tag, filename, or such?
A hierarchical tag structure would let you mimic a folder structure, but free you from many of its constraints
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders
You have to think in 'information dimensionality'. A yes/no toggle is 0D, a list is 1D, a list of lists (std hierarchy) are 2D, a list of list of list are 3D etc. All information storage types are one of these dimensions. Think of a graph-base file system with nodes and edges between everything. Now, imagine a filesystem where you flick a switch and the whole structure shows another pov ? Maybe you want the whole thing to be shown as file-type hiearchy, or only parts of it. Maybe you need to show movement in the structure, so everything are in a temporal/spatial hierarchy, maybe you are only interested in dependencies ? Relations ? Other 'weird' metrics ? ..and so on. The main problem is to manage, find and show the needed information in a higher-dimentional fs.
Technically a normal file is also a list, or another ordered structure, but in this sense, they are just a node with further dimensionality.
There's a TON of information layers locked away in our normal filesystem hierarchy, so OP are perfectly right, and people here have no imagination or even a world model of information structures..