March 15, 2026
Forty lines and a comment war
Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why we don't use Yjs
Dev says 40 lines beat the trendy tool; commenters yell “brilliant!” and “baloney”
TLDR: The post argues you can build Google-Docs‑style editing without the popular Yjs tool, using a simple server-led approach in roughly 40 lines. Commenters erupted: some cheered the simplicity, others pushed classic methods, and one cried “AI slop,” spotlighting a bigger fight over complexity versus practicality in team editing tech.
A startup blog just lobbed a grenade into the collab-editing world: skip the trendy library Yjs (a popular tool for syncing edits) and do it with about 40 lines of code using ProseMirror collab. Translation for non-nerds: the author claims you don’t need the flashy stuff to make Google-Docs-style editing work — unless you want true peer-to-peer with no “leader” at all.
Cue the comments section turning into a stadium. The hype squad arrived first: one user cheered, “Amazing,” like someone just found a cheat code. A veteran chimed in to say they’ve been wrestling this beast for 3+ years, building tools that do exactly this server-led approach. Then the purists stormed in: “Just use OT,” one declared — meaning an older method called Operational Transform that powers many real-time editors. Another commenter got nostalgic about Google MobWrite (RIP, early-2010s sync tech), while a skeptic threw shade with an “AI slop” accusation, claiming the post reads like machine-written mush.
Through it all, the core beef stayed spicy: do you really need complex, buzzword-heavy tech to handle live collaboration, or is a simple “one authority keeps order” setup enough for most cases? The crowd is split, the popcorn is hot, and the takes are sizzling.
Key Points
- •The article argues Yjs and similar CRDT-based algorithms are unsuitable for live collaboration, not just offline use.
- •A simple authority-based approach using prosemirror-collab can provide optimistic updates, offline editing, and synchronization with far less complexity.
- •Offline reconciliation inherently yields odd/arbitrary results across CRDTs, OT, and the proposed method; the goal is parity with less complexity, not better merges.
- •The protocol uses a single authority holding document state, steps, and version; clients rebase when their lastSeenVersion lags the authority.
- •prosemirror-collab-commit can perform server-side rebasing; the approach is p2p-capable via an authority but is not masterless like CRDTs.