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Comment by nullzzz | Hacker News Reader

I think it’s an exaggeration to say ”Building experiences with real-time components was previously only accessible to multi-billion dollar companies”. For instance my hobby project ourboard.io provides realtime collaboration and it costs like 20$ to host with current moderate load of users. It utilizes Y.js for collab text editing. Y.js is dedinitely a great tech and has a low entry barrier.

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There's a whole host of similar solution in the local-first realm of software[1].

I'm biased but you should definitely try Triplit[2] if you want a super easy way to make real-time collaborative software that works seamlessly even when offline or on unreliable networks (like on mobile).

[1] https://localfirstweb.dev/ [2] https://triplit.dev

If you consider it from the Cloudflare author's POV, it's likely an implied "at scale" in that statement.

Sure, but doing anything at a grand scale is expensive - realtime collab is no exception IMO, not that we already have things like Y.js. And don’t get me wrong, I’m not playing Cloudflare’s efforts down, just saying that particular claim is false.

Yeah I agree with it being an exaggeration. They are certainly riding the admittedly dated perception that realtime is so hard it's only available to the Googles and Figmas. But there's now some amazing open source solutions available like Y.js and ElectricSQL[1]. The barrier has certainly come down.

[1] https://github.com/electric-sql/electric

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