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Comment by stevenfabre | Hacker News Reader

Hi Hacker News,

My co-founder (Guillaume Salles) and I started making an online collaborative video presentation software. But instead of focusing on the core mechanics of the tool, we realized pretty quickly that we were spending a majority of our time figuring out how to handle real‑time collaboration.

A lot of questions had to be answered. What should happen when there are many people concurrently editing the same piece of data? Should all data even be handled the same way? What about people on slow connections? The list goes on.

We tried existing solutions, but none really stacked up for what we were trying to do. That’s when we decided to build our own. Liveblocks was born :)

We'll be around all day to answer any questions you have about Liveblocks — ask us anything!

Thanks, Steven

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Hi, thanks for posting! :) It reminds me of https://togetherjs.com/ which I guess you looked at? What were the shortfalls/differences that you found you had to address? Is your product React-only?

Hi! Great questions :)

Liveblocks does not come with a specific UI. We're providing APIs to create rooms and share states between users. The state can be volatile (like cursors, focused input, selection) or persisted even when the session is over, like a figma file or a google document (this part is still in private beta). We're using custom CRDTs for the persisted state.

We only have a javascript client and react client, but we plan to support more technologies in the future. Even native clients for desktop or mobile if there is an interest.

We have guides to install liveblocks with Next.js, Nuxt.js, and vanilla js + express. https://liveblocks.io/docs#installation

We also have open source repositories with working examples with these technologies.

https://github.com/liveblocks/javascript-examples https://github.com/liveblocks/next-js-examples https://github.com/liveblocks/nuxt-js-examples

Hope it helps! Don't hesitate if you have more questions

This looks great, how do you stack up against something like YJS?

Like Yjs, our Storage block is CRDTs based, but we're making different trade-offs. For example, our CRDTs are not "pure" so we solve some conflicts on the server. Also, we don't support Text CRDTs yet.

But Liveblocks is not just about conflicts resolution! Our vision is to shape our API and guides to help companies transform existing products into collaborative ones. For example, by simply adding live cursors and avatars and refreshing the data with existing REST endpoints, an existing app becomes more collaborative even if the conflict resolution is not perfect. At the same time, we provide analytics on how Liveblocks is used to help product teams prioritize their collaborative features and if they still want to integrate Liveblocks further.

We're also hosting the WebSocket infrastructure and make it scale because we know how troublesome it can be to maintain.

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