It's still early, but we have a checkpointing system that works very well for us. And once you have checkpoints you can start dropping inconsequential transactions in between checkpoints, which you're right, can be considered GC. However, checkpointing is desirable anyway otherwise new users have to replay the transaction log from T=0 when they join, and that's impractical.
As long as all clients agree on the order of CRDT operations then cycles are no problem. It's just an invalid transaction that can be dropped. Invalid or contradictory updates can always happen (regardless of sync mechanism) and the resolution is a UX issue. In some cases you might want to inform the user, in other cases the user can choose how to resolve the conflict, in other cases quiet failure is fine.
Unfortunately, a hard constraint of (state-based) CRDTs is that merging causally concurrent changes must be commutative. ie it is possible that clients will not be able to agree on the order of CRDT operations, and they must be able to arrive at the same state after applying them in any order.
I don't think that's required, unless you definitionally believe otherwise.
When clients disagree about the the order of events and a conflict results then clients can be required to roll back (apply the inverse of each change) to the last point in time where all clients were in agreement about the world state. Then, all clients re-apply all changes in the new now-agreed-upon order. Now all changes have been applied and there is agreement about the world state and the process starts anew.
This way multiple clients can work offline for extended periods of time and then reconcile with other clients.
1. Planned, but our first focus is the web app (plus desktop Electron)
2. Yes. We have a bunch of default views like table, kanban, photo gallery, and calendar. You can also create your own views with a JS plugin, like this silly example of spinning globe view: https://x.com/wcools/status/1898828593255346287
3. Our aim is a full feature todo app. But we won't have every feature on day 1.
In the short term a free open source govt alternative may be a net positive for society. I don't think it is in the long run. Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward. This project even advertises itself as a FOSS Notion alternative. Do government-sponsored clones encourage or stymie innovation? I think the latter.
Every week we read in the news that the EU struggles with entrepreneurship. That our tech industry is languishing. That the EU gets out-competed by the US on software and by China on everything else. Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide. EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
I'm obviously biased because I'm also working on a product in this space. But if Notion developers must become farmers because innovation no longer pays that is a loss to the world in my book.
There are plenty of projects pushing the state of the art forward.
A very specific example: basically all interactive theorem proving tooling is built in public research halls. This has allowed Compcert, a C compiler with “no bugs”[0] to exist.
The Compcert case is interesting because private funding is also involved. Public state research can still pull in private funds! We are not entirely throwing in the towel!
[0] “no bugs” here means “we have defined a spec for C, and this compiler is guaranteed to compile your C code along the spec we defined, so long as your program terminates”. There’s some hand waving around a theorem prover’s own validity but all Compcert bugs have been “we misewrote a chunk of spec” varietals
Your whole argument is based on neomania: progress is always good and there is no point in working on something unless it advances the state of the art.
Certainly not. I don't believe progress is always good. But subsidies should be reserved for ambitious projects that push the state of the art forward. For those projects that realistically will not get funded commercially. CERN, for instance.
If that's true in a large organization, how do SaaS companies actually make a profit?
If you develop an in-house tool, you have very predictable user numbers so you can go on-prem versus cloud for the compute and save ~10x on that side.
You also have the benefit of being second, the other guys already did the hard work of UX research etc. and your in-house team just needs to replicate a slightly complicated CRUD app.
The one significant roadblock I can see is being able to put together the right team for the job. But cost-wise it has to be a no-brainer that in-house is cheaper.
They are putting their resources into the development of a product that can be universally shared and used. There is no favored party.
Also, I completely disagree with the "ambitious projects". I actually would favor the government let all the risky ventures to private enterprises and focused only on tried-and-true developments and make them universally available to its citizens.
>government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.
why it would need to be state of the art? it needs to be stable and 'good enough'. This isn't rocket science, nor quantum mechanics - this is literally a glorified CRUD app that focuses on documentation.
As of 2025 any US-based services are persona non grata for national security reasons. Which other nation's services could the EU switch to that isn't from US?
> Government projects like these are not likely to really push the state-of-the-art forward.
Well, if a government project can easily push you out, then you're not really a state-of-the-art.
> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
Governments need to think long-term. And one danger of relying on something like Notion is vendor lock-in. You can't easily migrate your data out of Notion, with all the rich content preserved (edit history, text comments, etc.)
EU can try to mandate a common interoperability standard, but it takes years and the end result always ends up being behind the state of the art.
The government could act like an immortal mega corp if it had the authority to do so. Such as pushing out competition via loss leaders. And as a bonus, with the government, every program can be a loss leader.
The funding potential for this pattern is constrained today, which is why government projects that compete with private industry are generally terrible. But, clearly, the money is there to be captured by this segment out of government funding generally, if the government is allowed to enter business directly.
The solid argument I see against allowing such actions is a slippery slope towards the above. Slippery slope arguments aren’t always correct, of course, but they aren’t always wrong either; they just point out a risk. Depending on one’s risk tolerance, it is wise to avoid slippery slopes when you can’t quantify just how steep it is.
One limiting factor: the government-produced software will be open source. So the barriers for innovation will be significantly lower for _everyone_.
Right now, I can't fix that one small bug in Notion that keeps bothering me. I have to raise an issue and hope that they add the API required to do that. In the case of open source base produced by the government, I can make a small (perhaps paid) add-on with that functionality.
Yeah totally I think this instance is fine too. I’m kind of speculating why some people seem to get a spooky feeling around stuff like this, even though on the surface it seems totally innocuous.
Government crowding out companies is absolutely a concern. I don't want the government running grocery shops or making video games.
But it works fine for infrastructure where competition is not only rare, but often is counter-productive, like for sewer and water delivery. Can this include software infrastructure? Maybe.
> Europe should be making industry-leading apps. Europe should produce software startups that make products that get used worldwide.
I've kind of lost hope when it comes to commercial services and proprietary apps. They're sadly all sooner or later enshittified. We need something different, not by promises but by design (FOSS).
> EU subsidized clones of popular American products feels like admitting defeat.
I think it's a fresh and needed take on the financing of our common digital infra.
Typically a FOSS community seems to take a while to get started, but once it gets going (Blender, Linux, etc) it tends to stick around and even seriously gain traction.
Maybe you are not building something in the sector but do you have any idea of how shitty collaborative work is for public agents ?
The possibility of data being sifoned back to the US if they use american cloud services has millions of public agents not being able to collaborate online.
Some of them try to provide on premise versions of the software but Microsoft want you so bad to pay for 365 or teams that they are willing to maintain only super old versions.
I spoke with a guy reponsible for 100k public agents who told me his only choice is to host Sharepoint 2011 (in 2025 !)
So maybe Docs is not as innovative as Notion but hey, we need as efficient as we can public servants. And we will do that by providing modern tools they can use online with their colleagues.
+ When we think of Microsoft we think about the Office Suite but in lot of cases they do the authentication with Active Directory. Go luck doing interoperability or SSO accross agencies when all of them rely on closed source code and are locked in by vendors...
We're actually solving with OIDC identity federation called ProConnect.
Thymer[1] uses CRDTs for everything. It's an IDE for tasks and planning. It's a multiplayer app, end-to-end encrypted and offline first, optionally self-hosted, and an entire workspace is a single graph. So CRDTs were the logical choice.
All operations in Thymer get reduced to a handful of CRDT transformations. It doesn't matter whether you are moving or copying text, changing "frontmatter" attributes, dragging cards, uploading files, or adding tags. It's all done with the same handful of CRDT operations. Although this was a lot of extra work up front (we're not using any libraries) the benefits make it totally worth it. When your application state is a single graph you can move text between pages, link between pages (with backlinks), have transclusions, and do all sorts of cool stuff without having to worry about synchronization. CRDTs guarantee that all clients converge to the same state. And because CRDTs are by their nature append-only you get point-in-time versioning for free! We did end up having to make a couple of compromises for performance, though. Version history is not available offline (too much data) and in some cases we resort to last-writer-wins conflict resolution. On balance I think CRDTs are very much worth it, especially if you design an app with CRDTs in mind from day one. I probably wouldn't use CRDTs if I had to retrofit multiplayer in a more conventional AJAX app. Mutations in CRDTs are first applied optimistically, and then when the authoritative sequence of events is determined all clients need to revert their state to the last shared state and then re-apply all events in the correct order (thereby guaranteeing that all clients end up in the same state). Sometimes your app might need to revert and re-apply days worth of changes if you've been offline for a while. This all happens behind the scenes and the user doesn't know how many tree transformations are happening in the background but I guess my point is that CRDTs affect the design of the entire application. Most apps that are popular today were designed back when CRDT transformations were not yet well understood.
Both "everything in the cloud" and "everything local" have their obvious technical advantages, and I think they are mostly well understood. What really drives the swing of the pendulum are the business incentives.
Is the goal to sell mainframes? Then tell customers than thin clients powered by a mainframe allow for easy collaboration, centralized backups and administration, and lower total cost of ownership.
Do you want recurring SaaS revenue? Then tell customers that they don't want the hassle of maintaining a complicated server architecture, that security updates mean servers need constant maintenance, and that integrating with many 3rd party SaaS apps makes cloud hosting the logical choice.
We're currently working on an Local First (and E2EE) app that syncs with CRDTs. The server has been reduced to a single go executable that more or less broadcasts the mutation messages to the different clients when they come online. The tech is very cool and it's what we think makes the most sense for the user. But what we've also realized is that by architecting our software like this we have torpedoed our business model. Nobody is going to pay $25 per user per seat per month when it's obvious that the app runs locally and not that much is happening on the server side.
Local First, Forever is good for the user. Open data formats are good for the user. Being able to self-host is good for the user. But I suspect it will be very difficult to make software like this profitably. Adobe's stock went 20x after they adopted a per seat subscription model. This Local First trend, if it is here to stay (and I hope it will be) might destroy a lot of SaaS business models.
Thymer has real-time multiplayer with CRDT based synchronization. With org-mode you can collaborate, but you'd have to DIY with git or something similar. Thymer is also end-to-end encrypted. With org-mode you'd have to self-host something to sync with your phone.
Org-mode is text based, Thymer has a document graph. Advantages of the graph approach is you can nest as much as you want and zoom in on any part of the graph. You can transclude sections and have references and backlinks. With text based approaches you have to sprinkle location identifiers (guids or relative paths typically) into your document so you can track the location as files gets edited. But guids are awkward and paths can result in broken (back)links. We built Thymer as a document graph from the ground up. Tree mutations don't break (back)links.
With Thymer every node in the graph has metadata. Who last edited it? When? Where did it move from? Previous versions? For text paragraphs this isn't super useful, but when you have tasks this metadata is very useful.
org-mode on a phone? I'm sure there are apps for that, but I think it's designed with a keyboard in mind. Thymer uses the (subjectively) more modern command palette approach where you don't have to remember as many shortcuts, and it also translates more easily to touchscreen devices.
