It seems equivalent without loss of valuable properties to the conflict/rebase approach described here[0], and while it probably could be adapted to a p2p setting, the space requirements seem like they would not scale as well as the CRDT-based approaches like RGASplit[1].

What are your thoughts on competing algorithms?

[0]: http://marijnhaverbeke.nl/blog/collaborative-editing.html

[1]: https://github.com/atom/teletype-crdt

Thanks for the reply, and the code!

Differential synchronization does not require a fixed polling interval. You can have real time updates as each party types, in fact the algorithm prefers this setup as it is easier to process a lot of small changes rapidly. Neil goes into further detail in this google talk about why this is the case: https://youtu.be/S2Hp_1jqpY8?t=2815. The trick is sync after someone changes the document while including a short debounce so that you aren't overloading the system with superfluous edits.