FRfreedude·Aug 3, 2023
In Pushpinautomerge
pushpin
TypeScript2020–2023
automerge / pushpin
pushpin
A collaborative corkboard app
5Distinct people
5Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
685GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
A collaborative corkboard app
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year5 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-08-02 15:19:14 UTC to 2023-08-03 20:11:58 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
5 sourcesMost of the CRDT examples I've seen appear to be Electron apps e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin.
My understanding is that CRDT's rely on having a safe place to store data on the user's machine (otherwise it's a bit like doing a `git clone` to receive new data, rather than a `git pull`).
Is this not a major limitation for people hoping to use it for web apps?
In CRDT resourcesOne way to think about it: some of ink & switch's other projects use hypermerge to manage data/state e.g. https://github.com/automerge/pushpin. In farm, we use hypermerge for data and source code. As a result, not only are farm applications local-first*, the development and distribution of those applications is also local-first and collaborative.
*https://www.inkandswitch.com/local-first.html
In Farm – an experiment in distributed peer-to-peer computingCRDTs seem very promising, but we still have a long way to go. The most exciting work in this area is being done by Ink&Switch [0]. They have a number of interesting real-world app prototypes based on CRDTs.
- An interesting case where CRDTs failed is Xi-editor, where they tried to use CRDTs as the basis for a plugin system [1,2].
- One of the biggest problems with CRDTs is the overhead needed to keep track of the full document history. The automerge [3] project has been working on efficient compression of CRDTs for JSON datatypes.
- The idea of monotonic updates is really appealing at first, but I was disappointed when I realized there's no good solution to handle deletions. Tombstones, to me, seem like kind of a hack, albeit a necessary one. Practically, CRDTs aren't the silver bullet they might seem like at first.
- Another lesson
Read the rest
learned is that when ten people are editing the same paragraph, there's not really a right answer. I think the key to implementing CRDTs is doing it at the correct level of granularity.
- ProseMirror intentionally chose NOT to use CRDTs [4].
- Some more good references are [5,6,7]
[0] https://inkandswitch.com/
[1] https://github.com/xi-editor/xi-editor/issues/1187#issuecomm...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19886883
[3] https://github.com/automerge and https://github.com/automerge/pushpin
[4] https://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html
[5] Kleppmann 2020, "CRDTs: The Hard Parts" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7drE24geUw with HN Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23802208
[6] Kleppmann 2019, "Interleaving Anomalies in Text Editors" https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/interleaving-papoc19.pdf
[7] https://abishov.com/xi-editor/docs/crdt-details.html
Hello, we've published some more work in this space -- no HTML version yet, but here's a more recent paper on our PushPin project.
https://martin.kleppmann.com/papers/pushpin-papoc20.pdf
You can also try PushPin for yourself:
https://github.com/automerge/pushpin/
likely outdated binaries are available here:
https://automerge.github.io/pushpin/
Also, we're currently in the midst of a new project called Cambria, exploring some of the consequences and data demands for a new Cambrian-era of software here: https://inkandswitch.github.io/cambria/
In Local-first software (2019)