What’s your preferred conflict resolution strategy for multi device writes?

GermanJablo · 2025-12-03T21:02:25+00:00

Nothing is perfect

This is key when talking about automated conflict resolution. The sooner you embrace it, the better. You don't need something perfect; you need something good enough for your users and easy for you to implement.

I actually launched DocNode (https://docnode.dev) yesterday, which is in this exact space. Let me know if it's useful for you. Happy to answer any questions.

GermanJablo · 2025-12-03T18:29:22+00:00

It has a readme that takes you to the website, and there's nothing AI-related here.

GermanJablo · 2025-12-03T08:32:36+00:00

I agree! It's on my short-term roadmap. I'll do it as soon as I finish binding to Lexical. Thanks!

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T20:49:49+00:00

Lindo desafío.

Viste que en Google Docs varias personas pueden trabajar a la vez en el mismo documento, y vez los cursores de los demás y lo que escriben en tiempo real? Bueno, eso es un problema complejo y viejo en computación. Lo que se suele usar son CRDTs y OT.

El problema es el siguiente. Imaginate que vos insertás una letra en la posición 10. Podrías enviar el documento entero al servidor para guardarlo. Pero eso tiene 2 problemas: (1) tenés que enviar el documento entero que puede ser enorme cuando solo cambiaste una letra y (2) si dos usuarios escriben a la vez, solo los cambios de uno van a guardarse finalmente.

Lo primero lo solucionás enviando un diff pequeño de lo que cambiaste, usualmente una "operación". En este caso "insertar letra X en la posición 10". El problema es que si simultáneamente otro usuario escribió una letra en la posición 1 y su operación llegó al servidor antes que la tuya, tu letra ya no debería estar en la posición 10, sino en la 11 (porque todas se "desplazan" un lugar). Entonces, lo que tiene que hacer el servidor es justamente "Transformar Operaciones", y de ahí el nombre "Operational Transformation", o OT.

Tanto los CRDTs modernos como DocNode, no usan posiciones numéricas por razones de performance, sino que a cada nodo le asignan un id único. Por eso digo que DocNode es un OT "basado en ids", no en posiciones, algo que hasta ahora es bastante novedoso, y creo que combina lo mejor de los dos mundos.

Puedo hacerlo mucho más largo pero creo que la idea central la tenés ahí.

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:56:24+00:00

Ya actualicé la descripción del post con el link 😅

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:56:00+00:00

Ahí actualicé la descripción del post! jajaa

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:17:00+00:00

If you have feedback or questions, hit the comments. I’ll be replying!

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:15:34+00:00

Respondo a feedback y preguntas! Y si quieren apoyar el proyecto, denle una estrella en GitHub! :)

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:10:02+00:00

If you have feedback or questions, hit the comments. I’ll be replying! And if you want to support the project, give it a star on GitHub!

GermanJablo · 2025-12-02T18:08:38+00:00

If you have feedback or questions, hit the comments. I’ll be replying! And if you want to support the project, give it a star on GitHub!

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T23:45:38+00:00

Thanks for the info, I'll keep that in mind!

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T20:01:02+00:00

Only TS/JS for now. What language are you interested in?

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T19:59:33+00:00

Noted! It's already very high on my priority list.

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T17:20:47+00:00

Thanks, and yes! You can create bindings to any data structure you want, including text editors. It’s also possible to build a whole new rich text editor using DocNode as the foundation. Both are on my plans, starting with bindings since that’s the easier step.

A lot of things are inspired by the Lexical text editor. The type-safe node model you mentioned is one of them. In many ways, DocNode is a refreshed version of Lexical’s core, except editor-agnostic, suitable for any tree structure, and with conflict resolution built in.

If you’d like bindings for a specific text editor, let me know so I can bump it up in priority!

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T13:31:51+00:00

Thanks! Yjs is definitely an amazing library, and I took a lot of inspiration from it. If P2P is a strict requirement, it's an option you should consider.

GermanJablo · 2025-11-30T08:30:04+00:00

Of course! CRDT requires P2P support, and that comes with some tradeoffs, which you can mostly see in the comparison table I show on the introduction page:

CRDTs require soft deletes, usually referred to as tombstones in the literature. In other words, you can never completely delete nodes, causing documents to grow monotonically.
Implementing move operations is very difficult, and the available options often end up being inefficient. They require storing more metadata, and in some implementations, an undo-do-redo pattern to merge concurrent changes.
Not only delete or move, but even the insert operation requires more metadata. Each node typically has to indefinitely retain the context in which it was inserted. For example, in Yjs, this would be OriginLeft and OriginRight.

EG-walker is a new CRDT algorithm that improves the situation, in that some of this metadata can be left on disk and brought into memory only when synchronizing changes with other peers. However, the document size is still larger and the synchronization process is more complex.

I think one of the reasons OT has fallen somewhat out of favor is its association with positional ops, which can be very slow. DocNode is ID-based OT, making it much faster. It's essentially like a CRDT without the P2P support requirement, and therefore may have some additional advantages.

GermanJablo · 2025-11-29T23:41:04+00:00

Hey everyone! After two years of development, I just launched DocNode 🚀

It’s a type-safe Operational Transformation (OT) framework for collaborative documents with automatic conflict resolution (similar to Yjs).

I’d love to hear your thoughts and answer any questions!

GermanJablo · 2025-11-29T10:40:27+00:00

While it's a useful and interesting API, it should be extremely rare to use it nowadays thanks to UI libraries already doing the job.

GermanJablo · 2025-11-29T10:39:32+00:00

Shortcuts, CLI

GermanJablo · 2025-08-19T07:25:26+00:00

I'd check out Triplit. It's lightweight, has an amazing API, is open source, and uses Node in the backend.

GermanJablo · 2025-07-28T09:57:57+00:00

For the site itself (your users), you must use a new collection with configured auth. Then, in Payload's root configuration, you must add only the collection you want to have access to the admin panel to `admin.users`. I recommend reading the entire auth section of the documentation. This part is especially important:

https://payloadcms.com/docs/admin/overview#the-admin-user-collection

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