yjs VS awesome-react-state-management

Hi HN!

Nostr-CRDT is an experimental project that connects Yjs [1] (a proven, high performance CRDT) with Nostr [2].

I wanted to learn about the Nostr protocol and see if it'd be possible to send updates to state (e.g.: edits of a rich text document, updates to a todo list) over Nostr.

Nostr describes itself as "The simplest open protocol that is able to create a censorship-resistant global "social" network once and for all.".

I like the idea of a decentralized social network, but what if we can decentralize more kinds of apps and create decentralized, local-first collaborative applications? I've been exploring this area for a while and earlier shared a Show HN post that does this over Matrix [3].

There's still lots to figure out, but imo it's a very exciting and rapidly developing space - looking fwd to your thoughts already!

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

[2] https://github.com/nostr-protocol/

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29978659

PS: for an instant demo you can open this link and click the green button to load the doc and connect over Nostr (using a new anonymous account): https://nostr-crdt-yousefed.vercel.app/#room=6d749539e1dd9ef...

No back-end. Data is shared via WebRTC directly between connected browsers. I'm using Yjs to help me with that.

also there is this Javascript library that implements Conflict Resistant Data Types

There are a lot of implementations of CRDTs out there. In JavaScript, for instance, we have Y.js (https://github.com/yjs/yjs) and automerge (https://github.com/automerge/automerge). There’s also a Y.js demo (https://demos.yjs.dev/prosemirror/prosemirror.html) that allows you to play around with them and have your own collaborative app running in just a few seconds. All messages are exchange via webRTC and manages the state via CRDTs. This can be a great sandbox to understand how CRDTs work and see.

Yjs is being quite heavily used in the industry[1], and being researched for even more companies. There are also demos showing how to integrate it with an existing rich text editors[2]. If you have some ideas about the missing parts, you could also open topic on discuss.yjs.dev - the documentation page (https://docs.yjs.dev) has tons of useful links.

Re. other purpose projects - Yjs/Yrs main target are sequential data structures (text, arrays), but it also has support for maps and xml-like elements. In general you can build most data structures with it. I agree that it would be nice to have some other applications in demos though.

[1] https://docs.yjs.dev/yjs-in-the-wild

Anyone unsure of what a CRDT is, this is the perfect intro: https://www.inkandswitch.com/peritext/

The two most widely used CRDT implementations (combining JSON like general purpose types and rich text editing types) are:

- Automerge https://github.com/automerge/automerge

- Yjs https://github.com/yjs/yjs

I've always been curious about real-time multiplayer user interfaces.

When I found out about CRDTs and Yjs[1] I thought they could serve as a solid base for a project like that.

So I built this pretty simple desktop-like UI (heavily inspired by lifeat.io) and used Yjs to replicate the whole UI state among multiple peers, creating the experience of a unique interface.

Try online: https://yboard.lol

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

First we look at solutions to the DOM data binding problem. There are a ton: