The Lindy Effect: UTF-8 and FAT32 Will Outlive Your SaaS

There’s a folder on my machine from 1998. I keep migrating it, disk to disk, machine to machine. It contains nothing fancy — plain text files, some .txt, some .md I renamed later. I can open every single one of them right now, with any tool I want. They don’t need updates, dependencies, or a paid subscription.

Compare that to the dashboard your team swears by this quarter. The one with the “lifetime” deal that’s already preparing for its Series C pivot. How long will those posts live? Will you even be able to export them?

The Infrastructure That Doesn’t Need DevOps

TYPO3 needs version upgrades. WordPress needs security patches. Most SaaS blogging platforms need your continued monthly payment or they vanish. But UTF-8? FAT32? They just sit there. Quietly compatible. Since practically forever.

This isn’t Luddite-ism. It’s respect for Lindy.

The Lindy Effect: The longer something has survived, the longer it’s likely to keep surviving.

Plain text has been readable on every operating system since the 1960s. It’s going to outlast whatever venture-funded platform your favorite writer uses today. Hell, it’ll probably outlast you.

File Systems Are the Original CMS

Hierarchies? Folders. Metadata? Extended attributes or YAML frontmatter. Version control? Git is just a fancy layer on top of files. Sync? rsync has handled that since 1996. Permissions? POSIX solved this decades ago.

We’ve spent billions reinventing basic file operations as “content management,” when the file system was already:

Distributed (any sync tool works)
Versioned (git, etc.)
Permissive (any editor reads it)
Portable (works on every device)
Long-lived (your grandkids can open that .txt file)

Worse Is Better

Richard Gabriel coined this in 1989, and the file system embodies it perfectly. It doesn’t have:

Real-time collaboration cursors
AI-powered content suggestions
Blockchain-backed proof-of-authorship

What it does have: it works. Everywhere. Forever.

That’s the genius of what Ju built with 5000blogs — a 5000k project. It doesn’t replace your file system. It reads it. The content lives where content should live — in files you own, in formats that last.

Ju wrote about the same idea from a personal angle — the journey from admiring complexity to building simplicity. Worth reading.

What I Actually Want From My Blog’s Future

I’m a middle-aged sysadmin. I’ve seen enough “modern” solutions become tomorrow’s migration headaches. What I want for my words:

I can read them in 30 years. Without emulation, without export tools, without begging some startup not to shut down.
I can move them anywhere. One rsync or git clone and my entire blog is portable.
No one can hold them hostage. No API rate limits, no “your account requires verification,” no surprise pricing changes.

Plain text gives me all three.

The Boring Tech Manifesto

Dan McKinley’s Boring Technology principle applies to writing too:

Choose the technology that will be simple to operate, not the one that looks impressive on your resume.

For blogs, the most boring choice is files. The most exciting choice is whatever Hacker News is hyping this week.

I choose boring. I choose to still have my words when the hype cycle moves on.

I’ll end with a thought experiment:

In 2075, what will still work?

A .txt file from 2025? Absolutely.
A WordPress site you didn’t update? Doubtful.
That VC-backed “future of publishing” platform? Only if they pivoted to something profitable enough to survive, which probably involved deleting your free tier content.

Write like your words should live longer than your current job. They probably should.

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