Why does Operational Transform require a central server?
OT needs a total ordering of operations across all clients to know which transformation to apply. A central server acts as the authority—it receives operations, orders them, transforms each incoming op against all prior ops it did not see, and broadcasts the canonical result. Peer-to-peer OT is theoretically possible but requires expensive consensus.
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Operational Transforms vs CRDTsWhy Google Docs needs a server and Figma doesn't: how two competing approaches to concurrent editing resolve the same-string conflict, and when each wins.
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