This talk is an extension of my earlier Data Replication Design Spectrum blog post. The blog post was the analysis of the various replication algorithms, which concludes with showing that Raft has no particular advantage along any easy analyze/theoretical dimension. This builds on that argument to try and persuade you out of using Raft and to supply suggestions on how to work around the downsides of quorum-based or reconfiguration-based replication which makes people shy away from them.

Whether your app is local-first or more traditional, collaborative text editing is a tricky problem that requires advanced algorithms. Or does it? In this talk, I will describe a simple approach to collaborative text editing based on intuitive “insert after” operations. By using these operations in a general-purpose collaborative architecture (server reconciliation), you can implement text editing without CRDTs or OT. I will also discuss nuanced conflict resolution and decentralized variants.

Text version: https://mattweidner.com/2025/05/21/text-without-crdts.html