[pscanf]

That would simplify things, but in my opinion that is still too high a hurdle. I'm all about privacy and FOSS, but I don't self-host anything (except for my personal website).

I wish that more apps would instead move the logic to the client and use files on file syncing services as databases. Taking tasks as an example, if a task board were just a file, I could share it with you on Dropbox / Drive / whatever we both use, and we wouldn't need a dedicated backend at all.

The approach has limitations (conflict resolution, authorization, and latency are the big ones), but it is feasible and actually completely fine for lots of apps.