See also smart_open: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open which might be more user-friendly? Never used it myself but it was on HN before. Discussion on their bugtracker: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/smart_open/issues/579

Personally I wasn't too impressed with fsspec, though I am using it. I had to wrap files with Python's io wrappers to get acceptable performance, and found that different fsspec implementations still have significant differences that you can't ignore. They don't seem interested in supporting or documenting use cases outside of Pandas and Dask.