| title | CRDTs for collaborative editing | ||
|---|---|---|---|
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Conflict-free replicated data types let two clients edit the same document offline and merge the result deterministically. Two flavors matter: state-based (CvRDTs) and operation-based (CmRDTs).
If your network is unreliable but you can ship every state mutation through a message broker, CmRDTs win: smaller payloads, fewer wasted bytes.
Causality tracking — vector clocks specifically — grows with the number of replicas. Yjs and Automerge invest a lot of effort in compressing those metadata structures so they don't dominate the on- wire payload for long-lived documents.