I'm not aware of any providers that offer the ease of google drive and the access of S3 (ie can I host a website on it). As far as I know both GDrive and Dropbox removed the ability to host files on the web in the last couple years. Do you know of any comparable products that offer both of those? I'd be very interested in looking at them. I think S3 is the closest, because you can access the filesystem through their browser APIs, and publicly over HTTP. And it got popular enough for people to make open server implementations. The problem with S3 at the moment are that it wasn't designed for this use case, so it's missing features like Firebase-style update events.
> However, the flat filesystem model would be awful for most productivity apps. Think GMail, Google Docs, Calendar, Slack, Trello, GitHub, Jira, etc. These are the use cases I care about.
GMail, for sure. GDocs, I can't think of why you couldn't implement it for a reasonable number of users with nothing but texts files using atomic updates, or maybe come up with a standard protocol for invoking text-based CRDTs. Or just send the change updates as git diffs and if someone tries to change a line that would result in a conflict reject that change and send back the current state of the document. This would be sufficient for any app for the which the data can be expressed as text files. Worst case you could even allow something like CF Workers for cases where you absolutely need centralized logic, but I think there are a large number of tasks you can accomplish without that. Even something like slack I think you could implement with text files on a disk. Pre-SSDs I'd have to agree with you, but nowadays I think a generic filesystem is good enough for most things that don't involve scale.
> Video, music, and images might be the bulk of most users data by raw volume but certainly not by frequency of access or importance.
True