SyncedStore VS FluidFramework

This article has been quite the inspiration for many projects and progress on this front. I think we're seeing more and more developments around CRDTs and local-first frameworks / applications.

I'm working on a few projects in this area:

- https://www.typecell.org - Notion meets Notebook-style live programming for TypeScript / React

- https://www.blocknotejs.org - a rich text editor built on TipTap / Prosemirror that supports Yjs for local-first collaboration

- https://syncedstore.org - a wrapper around Yjs for easier development

In my experience so far, some things get more complicated when building a local-first application, and some things get a lot easier. What gets easier is that once you've modeled and implemented the data-layer (which does require you to rethink / unlearn a few principles), you don't need to worry about data-fetching, errors etc. as much as in a regular "API-based" app.

Another interesting video I recommend on this topic is about Linear's "Sync Engine" which employs some of the local-first techniques as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo2m3jaJixU

Hi! Great questions :)

First of all, SyncedStore does not implement any CRDT algorithms. Credits for this go to Yjs [1] (and its author Kevin), which it uses as underlying CRDT.

Yjs and Automerge are (afaik) the two most commonly used CRDT implementations. Both have their pros and cons, but Yjs has focused a lot on performance [2].

Automerge has a bit friendlier "Immer style" [3] API. I'm not too familiar with @localfirst/state, but it seems to add a Redux style API on top of Automerge.

My approach with SyncedStore was really to provide an API on top of Yjs that's as simple as possible to use in React / Vue / Svelte or plain JS app. I.e.: only use a single React Hook to observe changes, and use regular Javascript assigments to update values. The API is inspired mostly by Reactive Programming libraries such as MobX [4] (from the same author as Immer).

Hope you're still following along :) Maybe it helps to compare the TODO-MVC applications, as both SyncedStore (https://github.com/YousefED/SyncedStore/tree/main/examples) and @localfirst/state (https://github.com/local-first-web/state/tree/main/examples/...) have implemented these as examples!

[1]: https://github.com/yjs/yjs

I’m exploring the ideas (an easy to use framework to build local-first [1] apps) in my library Reactive-CRDT (https://github.com/yousefed/reactive-crdt). Feedback welcome!

All credit for the underlying tech to YJS, which has been amazing as mentioned by others in this thread.

[1]: https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html

Have you seen FluidFramework? It's open source (MIT): https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework

I think the first product they're building on it is Loop: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-introduces-loop-a-ne...

Full disclosure I work at MSFT and on the fluid framework.

If you are interested in this you may also be interested in the fluid framework, https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework

We use websockets and solve a lot of the state management problem called out here by keeping very little state on the server itself. The primary thing on server is a monotonically increasing integer we use to stamp messages, this gives us total order broadcast which we then build upon: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_broadcast

Here are some code pointers if you want to take a look:

The map package is a decent place to look for how we leverage total order broadcast to keep clients in sync in our distributed data structures:

(Disclosure: Work at Microsoft, but I work in Azure and some open source stuff, not on or directly with Fluid/Office/etc.)

That's just a trademark clause for Microsoft logos and brands. The Fluid Framework itself is [MIT licensed](https://github.com/microsoft/FluidFramework/blob/main/LICENS...) and doesn't require exposing any of those logos/brands when you use it, so the framework itself is fairly open for usage.

I think the main thing that would slow down adoption for Fluid is that the only "production" backend is an Azure service, which isn't part of the open source Fluid Framework. [Other open source backends](https://fluidframework.com/docs/deployment/service-options/) aren't recommended for productions. Until there are some open source ones, I'd assume adoption will be limited to folks in the Azure ecosystem.

Within the context of the Microsoft-verse, Fluid Framework (https://fluidframework.com) is supposed to be solving similar problems in web apps, although I haven't personally played with it.

Microsoft recently open sourced fluid framework. It is a distributed, consensus based, real time collaboration framework written in typescript. Fluid would keep your clients synced up and your server code would only have to handle when someone hits submit. Fluid Framework

The official documentation and the github repository seem clear.