[jdvh]

We're using a single end-to-end encrypted document tree synced with CRDTs for our collaborative task IDE[1]. All data for a team is a single tree (graph really, if you count transclusions) and its kind of magical how simple everything gets when you know all state will sync in a deterministic way between all clients. It doesn't matter whether you drag&drop some object or add a new user, or rename something. It all reduces to a handful of CRDT operations.

(We have a central server and the app works offline so the algorithm from the linked article doesn't apply in our case.)

[1] https://thymer.com

[jitl]

Are you using Yjs? How are you thinking about scale-up for teams with 100s - 1000s of users?

[jdvh]

We've looked at Yjs but ultimately decided to write our own thing from scratch.

Even scale-ups with thousands of users will have people working on different parts of the document tree in practice. The client doesn't need to receive every keystroke for people editing somewhere far away in the document tree. Those updates can be sent in batches every once in a while.

If 10.000 people decide to edit the exact same location in a document then performance will degrade. The client will start to lag behind if it can't keep up with the stream of updates (cpu or internet bottleneck) but eventually it will process everything and all clients will end up with the same state. We have two channels. One for state updates (soft real-time) and one for UI hints ("hard" real-time) and other user actions that aren't CRDT mutations.

[baran1]

How did you got end to end encryption working with CRDTs?