I'd argue that this concept for media is most commonly known as "playlists" and unfortunately only used within data silos, e.g. a playlist of YouTube videos, a Spotify playlist, a TV season of episodes, a series of episodes, a trilogy, etc. (Yes, I'd argue that your music library of mp3 files is also kind of a silo, although portable) Heck, even a slideshow is arguably a playlist.

I agree that putting a playlist-like concept into, say, the filesystem would be an extremely interesting idea but I think a big danger is running into the same problem as hardlinks and symlinks. This problem is that if a file is "present" in multiple places (or playlists) deleting/modifying/moving it can have unforeseen consequences and it's hard to reason about (and if you copy the file now you get to invent a way to track different versions too!). I think this is also holding tagging filesystems back.

I'm currently writing a non-hierarchical FUSE filesystem and have been thinking about this list-directory concept but I'm still not completely sure how it would work, especially since I need to remain backwards compatible with the POSIX interfaces. Will probably have to just try it out (xattrs to the rescue?) and see what sticks I suppose...

A linkdump of interesting somewhat related stuff:

- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/knowledge-structures

- https://newsletter.squishy.computer/p/all-you-need-is-links

- https://thesephist.com/posts/search-vs-nav/

- https://karl-voit.at/2017/02/10/evolution-of-systems/ Especially "Information-Centric Systems"

- https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... A classic 1945 article cited as inspiration by Ted Nelson, Doug Engelbart and Tim Berners-Lee.

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content-addressable_storage

- https://www.nayuki.io/page/designing-better-file-organizatio...

user:	syberant
created:	January 23, 2025
karma:	3