Good blog post, thanks for sharing.

I fully agree with your points about real openness, I think this “file over app philosophy” is the way to go for every self hosted app – make it possible get the data out of there.

What I did not quite understand is why using XML is slower? Why is that – are parsers just slower in general? I do not have a lot of experience with XML, but I always thought it pretty much doesn’t matter whether you send your data via JSON or XML. And how does your JSON structure solve the problem of “content heavyness”?

I tried to get my head around this too and wrote this a while ago: https://lemmy.world/post/34986579 – I called it localhosting, and it’s about some ideas that could bring more people into the boat.

I haven’t made much progress unfortunately, but I do believe that selfhosting needs to become more accessible for non techies. It’s a pity how many great open-source selfhostable alternatives are out there, and how little people can actually install and maintain them. This gap is wild to me.