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Re:Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why ... by ngruhn on Monday March 16, 2026 @09:33AM (#47398818)
> The less-well-known algorithm we ended up recommending here (which I will call "Marjin Collab", after its author) is essentially a very lightweight OT, without the "transformation" step.

You talk about "rebasing" changes in the article. Does that not imply a "transformation" step?

Re:Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why ... by mweidner on Monday March 16, 2026 @10:39AM (#47399661)
The rebasing step is indeed a transformation. Some info in the "rebasing" link here [1].

Unlike traditional Operational Transformation, though, there are no "transformation properties" [2] that this rebasing needs to satisfy. (Normally a central-server OT would need to satisfy TP1, or else users may end up in inconsistent states.) Instead, the rebased operations just need to "make sense" to users, i.e., be a reasonable way to apply your original edit to a slightly-further-ahead state. ProseMirror has this sort of rebasing built in, via its step mappings, which lets the collaboration-specific parts of the algorithm look very simple - perhaps deceptively so.

[1] https://prosemirror.net/docs/guide/#collab [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operational_transformation#Tra...

Re:Lies I was told about collaborative editing, Part 2: Why ... by antics on Monday March 16, 2026 @04:16PM (#47404296)
Author here, just chiming in to say that Matt has an actual PhD on the subject so rather than explain it worse, I will just let him say the probably-actually-correct thing here.