[antics]

But Kevin, you never really answered the question of the article. Unless I need a truly-masterless p2p topology, why would I do all this stuff, including throw away editor intent around things like block split, just to use Yjs? prosemirror-collab and prosemirror-collab-commit already seem to do all the things the Yjs docs claim to do (unbounded offline writes that reconcile automatically, optimistic updates, tolerant of all kinds of failures), and they work with 100% fidelity to the underlying model. AFAICT, the only thing that you need Yjs for, is true p2p editing.

This is a serious question, and the question of the article. I am here to learn what you mean, please explain.

[kevinjahns]

Yjs is about making things easy. It is a good abstraction to make anything collaborative (not everyone can implement something like prosemirror-collab).

I'd take the slight performance overhead any day if I get guaranteed syncs. Network protocols are not as reliable as you think they are. Detecting random drops of messages is hard. At scale, you are going to appreciate the sync guarantees.

prosemirror-collab doesn't give you offline editing either. Because, guess what - if there is no central server you can't edit the same doc from multiple tabs.

I once had a customer that accidentally deleted part of their database containing Yjs docs. Few of his users noticed, because their docs synced through y-indexeddb.

And it's fun. You can Yjs on anything. There is a company that syncs Ydocs through QR codes.

As a generic collab library, it does a very good job. CRDTs really are a fun thing to use. A lot of people feel that way.

If you want to use something else, that's totally fine! Write an article about how great prosemirror-collab is.

[antics]

But Kevin, prosemirror-collab does give me offline editing. I use it literally every day, entirely without issue. I write offline on different devices, and whenever I come online, it all syncs up. No issues.

It does not give me p2p topology. Is that what you mean?