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It does indeed turn out to be a difficult and subtle problem. We've tried to balance minimizing novelty (always risky in cryptographic systems) with achieving the various security and scaling properties we're looking for. We're very lucky at Ink & Switch to be working with Brooke Zelenka on this one.

Ideally, you would use existing commodity infrastructure but we have found none of it is really super fit for our purposes. Failing that, we have been developing an approach to low-maintenance reusable infrastructure. For now, I would advise running your own but positioning yourself to take advantage of commodity systems as they emerge.

Hey, thanks! I don't know what's regressed here but I've emailed the support people for buttondown.

Of course not. Kurt is up in Heaven now.

Automerge does indeed work with live collaboration, though apparently not currently as efficiently as some other solutions. Everyone working in this space is exploring and looking for solutions that will work for users woth slightly differing priorities. In addition to automerge consider checking out yjs, electricsql, diamond types, replicache, vulcn, or any of the other folks. Hopefully one of them will be just right for you.

Robust undo/redo remains an ongoing research project. Leo Stewen's work was presented at PLF 2023 a few days ago. It turns out to be a subtle problem to really get completely right, but in my experience you can usually get passable results by letting editors default undo behaviour reverse text input.

For applications with more document-structured data, you can now produce inverse patches using Automerge.diff to go between any two points. To implement a reasonable undo in this environment you can record whatever document heads you consider useful undo points and then patch between them.

To perhaps expand on why the problem remains unsolved slightly further, there was a robust discussion about what the expected behaviour of "undo" out to be in even simple cases at the conference.

The sync protocol does indeed calculate the delta between peers and efficiently catches both sides up.

The backends you see are the ones I use, but the API is a binary blob key value store with range queries: supporting other stores should be straightforward.

Authentication isn’t exactly left as an exercise to the reader but is an area of active work. I would say securing access to a URL via whatever mechanism you’re used to should be fine for client server applications and peer to peer folk seem to mostly have their own ideas.

Please accept my unreserved apologies, Heather! No offense is intended. I can speak for everyone working on Automerge when I say that we've very much appreciated Matthew's work and have indeed spent quite a lot of time studying and responding to it. We spoke about it in person last week, in fact.

As for the use-cases, I do not mean to exclude live collaboration from consideration, just to note that it hasn't been our focus or come up often in the use-cases we study. Live meeting notes are definitely a real use-case and I don't dispute the performance results you show.

As for Y-js, it's a wonderful piece of software with excellent performance and a vibrant community made by exceptional people like Kevin Jahns. We simply have slightly different goals in our work, which undoubtedly reflect where our engineering investments lie.

Indeed, your paper did not measure the same things we look at, and that's why it found new results. Hopefully in time we will join the other systems in performing well on your benchmarks as well.

Ink & Switch is behind it; or more expansively mostly Orion Henry, Alex Good, Martin Kleppmann, and myself. As an organization, we have been working on Automerge for about six years now. We also have a wonderful community of other contributors both in industry and research.

Automerge is not VC-backed software. Indeed, for a number of years Automerge was primarily a research project used within the lab. Over the last year, it has matured to production software under the supervision of Alex Good. The improved stability and performance has been a great benefit to both our community and internal users. Our intention is to run the project as sponsored open source for the foreseeable future and thus far we have done so thanks to the support of our sponsors and through some development grants.

Ink & Switch's research interests drive a lot of Automerge development but funding from sponsors allows us to work on features that are not research-oriented or to accelerate work that we'd like to do but that doesn't have current research applications. If you adopt Automerge for a commercial project, I'd encourage you to join the sponsors of Automerge to ensure its long-term viability.

Thanks, Scott. This API should make it much, much easier for folks to build with Automerge and kind of just encapsulates everything we've been doing in-house over the last few years.