From the ~1st collaborative text editing paper: if two users do "delete char @ index 7" concurrently, no serial ordering gives the correct answer. So the authors abandon serializability, leading to OT/CRDTs. But if you rephrase the ops as "delete char @ <per-char id>", both serial orders work!

It took almost two years…! The Fugue paper that @mweidner.bsky.social and I wrote about interleaving in collaborative text editing algorithms was finally accepted by IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems paywalled: ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/111... free: arxiv.org/abs/2305.00583

I made a guest post on @powersync.com's blog: powersync.com/blog/collabo... It describes a demo we made of collaborative text editing on top of PowerSync's DB sync engine, using character IDs & totally-ordered updates in a DB table (w/o CRDTs).

Watch @mweidner.bsky.social talk about collaborative text editing without CRDTs or OT. youtu.be/5CFrpd0sG-g?...

"Collaborative text editing without CRDTs or OT" Awesome talk from @mweidner.bsky.social on how you don't need CRDTs to build collaborative text editing.

New blog post: "Collaborative Text Editing without CRDTs or OT". It describes what I hope is a simpler and more flexible approach to the hardest part of a collaborative app, text editing. mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/t...

I look forward to talking about some new ideas from my work at Common Curriculum & CMU!

My most recent blog post (from last summer): Architectures for real-time collaborative apps using a central server. It includes classic CRDT/OT approaches, why those might be overkill, and a classification table for existing apps/tools. mattweidner.com/2024/06/04/s...