> CRDTs differ from simple leader/follower replication in that they do not designate an authoritative source-of-truth that all writes must pass through. Instead, all replicas are treated as equal peers. Each replica may be modified locally, and changes to any replica are propagated to the others.
This isn't wrong but it is a little misleading. CRDTs don't have any concept of peers at all. CRDTs are data structures with operations defined in terms of equivalent data structures. Peers in networks are incidental.
> In contrast, browsers are inherently not peer-to-peer. To run an application from the web, you connect to a server. Since the server is centralized anyway, we can have it enforce a global ordering over the events. That is, every replica receives events in the same orer. With this, we can sidestep the need to pay the CRDT complexity tax.
A server is not necessarily centralized. For example, a browser that loads e.g. www.bbc.co.uk will receive content from a POP relatively local to the client's phyiscal location. The website delivered to a browser IP in the UK is conceptually the same thing as the website devliered to a browser IP in Indonesia, but the server serving the bytes is different. Does this distinction matter? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.
This isn't wrong but it is a little misleading. CRDTs don't have any concept of peers at all. CRDTs are data structures with operations defined in terms of equivalent data structures. Peers in networks are incidental.
> In contrast, browsers are inherently not peer-to-peer. To run an application from the web, you connect to a server. Since the server is centralized anyway, we can have it enforce a global ordering over the events. That is, every replica receives events in the same orer. With this, we can sidestep the need to pay the CRDT complexity tax.
A server is not necessarily centralized. For example, a browser that loads e.g. www.bbc.co.uk will receive content from a POP relatively local to the client's phyiscal location. The website delivered to a browser IP in the UK is conceptually the same thing as the website devliered to a browser IP in Indonesia, but the server serving the bytes is different. Does this distinction matter? Sometimes yes, sometimes no.