[jakelazaroff]

If you’re not building something fully decentralized, you may be able to loosen some of the constraints CRDTs require. As an example, if you can guarantee that all clients have received changes later than X date, you can safely drop any operations from before that date.

[shipp02]

Could you also make it fully decentralized but require clients to come online within a deadline (1 day, week) or risk losing their local changes? This would also allowing trimming history but with loss of some functionality to sync.

[jakelazaroff]

Yes, you can go that direction as well, although in a decentralized architecture there’s no shared notion of “coming online”.

For example:

1. you have four peers collaborating on a document

2. for some extended period peer A only communicates with peer B and peer C only communicates with peer D (and vice versa)

3. the peers truncate the operations at some point within that period

4. each pair of peers now has a document irreconcilable with the other even though all peers “came online” recently