Ketan Agrawal 2022-09-11 23:27:48 Anyone working on / know the current landscape of protocols for real-time collaboration (ideally editor agnostic)? So far I’ve seen tandem and teletype, but neither seem to be active anymore.
Tony Worm 2022-09-12 16:18:39 check out CRDT and y.js, this is what people are largely talking about today for RTC. The more academic will point out issues, but they are a good enough solution for most.
Tony Worm 2022-09-12 21:36:42 Differential Synchronization is how Google docs originally worked (not sure if it is or not still the way)
neil.fraser.name/writing/sync
There were some interesting insights in the paper, notably that you only have to support a reasonable number of users at once.
Ketan Agrawal 2022-09-13 06:57:01 thank you both for the interesting pointers!! y.js and Peritext both look awesome. The asynchronous/branching model of Peritext is very interesting.
I’d love a future where people can do RTC on {code, notes, etc.} using a shared protocol like CRDT, but unlike Google Docs, not everyone is locked into the same tool
Tony Worm 2022-09-13 16:54:54 How much can you use git? This is what every professional programmer uses for collaboration on code, and RTC would break our workflows most of the time.
Ketan Agrawal 2022-09-16 04:44:09 Yeah, I mean I use git for work and all my projects. That said I do think there are use cases where RTC seems quite useful though (eg working remotely with someone on some experimental code)
Tony Worm 2022-09-16 16:41:51 The difficulty here is forcing developers to use a certain editor for RTC, vs using Zoom which has RTC by sharing controls. Most of the time, RTC does not need both people with a mouse and keyboard. Convincing developers to use a given IDE is harder than herding cats
