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0 pointsaboodman4y ago0 comments

Cool, I need to look into this more.

I think for many customers the authoritative server is an advantage. It's useful in SaaS apps for the server to be able to override the clients, for all kinds of reasons -- antiabuse, authorization, extra validation rules, or just fixing bugs.

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josephg4y ago

Yes, I completely agree. And I think we want both:

- A fast and well written CRDT that works in p2p networks should also work great for server-to-server replication in a data center (or across data centers).

- OT algorithms designed to work with centralized servers are simple, efficient, easy to code up and easy to work with. And they provide a really nice API for local applications to do IPC. CRDT libraries can expose OT endpoints just fine.

I'm still not 100% sure about what the best approach is in the P2P case. Embedding (/ linking) a CRDT library into every application would also work fine, but its complicated to get everything working across languages. And harder to update. The other option is running a single system / applicatoin wide CRDT-like service which manages credentials, that applications talk to like LSP / D-Bus. In that case, applications can just talk OT (which is much simpler).

Either approach would work.

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