Yeah, the UI and CLI show you “folders”. It’s a client-side thing that doesn’t exist in the actual service. Behind the scenes, the clients are making specific types of queries on the object keys.

You can’t examine when a folder was created (it doesn’t exist in the first place), you can’t rename a folder (it doesn’t exist), you can’t delete a folder (again, it doesn’t exist).

That's just an implementation detail of well known filesystems.

Yes, which is why it's not ideal to reuse the folder metaphor here. Users have an idea how directories work on well-known filesystems and get confused when these fake folders don't behave the same way.

Are all your s3 keys opaque strings (like UUIDs)?, do you use / (slash) in your keys?

If you truly believe S3 has absolutely no connection to folders, you would answer Yes and No.

It sounds to me like you’re arguing about what the definition of “folders” is.

“Any hierarchical path structure is a folder” is maybe your definition of “folder”, from what I can tell. I would say that S3 lets you treat paths as hierarchical, but that S3 does not have folders—obviously I have a different definition of “folder” than you do.

We’ve discovered that we have different definitions of “folder”, and therefore, we are not going to agree about whether it is true that “S3 does not have folders” unless we have an argument about what the correct definition of “folder” is. I’m not really interested in that discussion—it’s enough to understand what somebody means when they say “S3 does not have folders” even if you think their definitions are wrong.

I don’t think that’s a defensible standpoint.

Folders are an important part of the way most people use filesystems.

If you can't rename or delete a folder, yeah, I would say folders don't really exist.