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.
Not sure why people defend an archaic organization form here - reflex ?
You are perfectly right that files and folders are simplistic, and should naturally adapt to the pov that are more information rich/valuable. Hoomans tend to collapse a high-dimensional structures to 0D to 3D, so we can manage the information. In that sense, a std hierarchy is only ONE pov over a ton of pov over the same content. A standard hierarchy is only a low 2D dimension structure that are our first attempt at organizing information. It's not wrong - just imprecise af.
Anyway, hardlinks are a small step up, can build wild static structures (like a oneshot filesystem in Guix), but is cumbersome to control in multi-dimensional information structures. Likely not what you want, but look into fuse file systems if you want to move on to a dynamic file system hierarchy. An interesting one is a tag file system. It turns a standard limited hierarchy into a much more dynamic file-structure where a file can - and does - belong to a bunch of tags - file type, size, group, comments, whatnot. There are many many fuse fs that can convert anything into a better structured file system. Tagging is a step up from a dumb 2D hierarchy, but maybe a graph file system is the ultimate freeform dynamic filesystem that can present all the pov's we could possible need ?
Go for it.