Discussion
Lies I was Told About Collaborative Editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs
samlinnfer: Just use OT like normal people, it’s been proven to work. No tombstones, no infinite storage requirements or forced “compaction”, fairly easy to debug, algorithm is moderate to complex but there are reference open source implementations to cross check against. You need a server for OT but you’re always going to have a server anyway, one extra websocket won’t hurt you. We regularly have 30-50k websockets connected at a time. CRDTs are a meme and are not for serious applications.
bawolff: Reminds me a bit of google-mobwrite. I wonder why that fell out of favour.
truetraveller: Very likely AI slop, very hard to read. Too many indications. HN should have another rule: explicitly mention if article was written (primarily) by AI.
utopiah: Funnily enough I had 2 HN tabs open, this one and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47394004
kaiwenwang: It appears Moment is producing "high-performance, collaborative, truly-offline-capable, fully-programmable document editor" - https://www.moment.dev/blogThere seems to be a conflict of interest with describing Yjs's performance, which basically does the same thing along with Automerge.
antics: Author here. To be clear, we do not in ANY WAY compete with Yjs! We are a potential customer of Yjs. This article explains why we chose not to be a customer of Yjs, and why we don't think most people building real-time collaborative text editors shouldn't be, either.
antics: I'm the author. Literally 0% of this was written with AI. Not an outline, not the arguments, not a single word in any paragraph. We agonized over every aspect of this article: the wording, the structure, and in particular, about whether we were being fair to Yjs. We moved the second and third section around constantly. About a dozen people reviewed it and gave feedback.
antics: Hi folks, author here. I thought this was dead! I'm here to answer questions if you have them.
comex: It doesn’t strike me as AI. The writing is reasonably information-dense and specific, logically coherent, a bit emotional. Rarely overconfident or vague. If it is AI then there was a lot more human effort put into refining it than most AI writing I’ve read.
chrisweekly: "CRDTs are a meme and are not for serious applications."That is one hot take!
GermanJablo: I remember reading Part 1 back in the day, and this is also an excellent article.I’ve spent 3+ years fighting the same problems while building DocNode and DocSync, two libraries that do exactly what you describe.DocSync is a client-server library that synchronizes documents of any type (Yjs, Loro, Automerge, DocNode) while guaranteeing that all clients apply operations in the same order. It’s a lot more than 40 lines because it handles many things beyond what’s described here. For example:It’s local-first, which means you have to handle race conditions.Multi-tab synchronization works via BroadcastChannel even offline, which is another source of race conditions that needs to be controlled.DocNode is an alternative to Yjs, but with all the simplicity that comes from assuming a central server. No tombstones, no metadata, no vector clock diffing, supports move operations, etc.I think you might find them interesting. Take a look at https://docukit.dev and let me know what you think.
freekh: [delayed]
drpotato: Just wanted to say thanks! This is a great write up and resonates with issues I encountered when trying to productionise a yjs backed feature.
