Most of what I wanted to say is in the title.
An online platform is a company in the business of trying to be your computer and being bad at it.
The second part is deliberate.
Their applications only have to be good enough for you to use them.
Their "file managers" have to be so limited and hard to use that you will never try to move your information elsewhere.
There's no technology they will not break to make it impossible for you to run other people's applications on the information you gave them.
They already broke the Internet to do it.
A file in a reasonable format sitting on your local drive is not limited by what a company thinks you are paying enough or watching enough ads to be allowed to do. You can work on it using a nearly infinite number of programs for a nearly infinite number of intents: from systems complex enough to spend a lifetime mastering — and worth every hour of it — to tools of breathtaking elegance and sharpness of purpose.
It's hard to grasp the cumulative power of knowing just enough programming to be able to tell your computer exactly what to do with the files you are working on until you have experienced it yourself. Just as hard as it is to explain the indignity of then having to move to somebody's web application that only does what they want to do in the way they want it done. Maybe there's a dark mode.
People who work with data files write small programs all the time — it's called data wrangling — but then they go back to do everything else in self-limited platforms and apps trying to be the only thing you power on your computer for.
Personal computing is supposed to be fun in the same way that knitting, writing, or cooking can be fun. But the fun of cooking begins in your own kitchen with whatever ingredients you have at hand.
The fun of computing on in your local drive with your own files.
(Originally posted on my blog.)