Figma's Multiplayer Technology (2019)

Summary

When we first started building multiplayer functionalityMultiplayer Editing in FigmaToday’s public release of Figma contains two long-awaited changes. in Figma four years ago, we decided to develop our own solution. No other design tool offered this feature, and we didn’t want to use operational transforms (a.k.a. OTs), the standard multiplayer algorithm popularized by apps like Google Docs. As a startup we value the ability to ship features quickly, and OTs were unnecessarily complex for our problem space. So we built a custom multiplayer system that's simpler and easier to implement.At the time, we weren’t sure building this feature was the right product decision. No one was clamoring for a multiplayer design tool—if anything, people hated the idea. Designers worried that live collaborative editing would result in “hovering art directors” and “design by committee” catastrophes.But ultimately, we had to do it because it just felt wrong not to offer multiplayer as a tool on the web. It eliminates the need to export, sync, or email copies of files and allows more people to take part in the design process (like copy-writers and developers). Just by having the right link, everyone can view the current status of a design project without interrupting the person doing the work.Our bet paid off, and these days it’s obvious that multiplayer is the way all productivity tools on the web should work, not just design. But while we use products with live collaborative editing every day, there aren’t that many public case studies on these production systems.We decided it was time to share a peek into how we did it at Figma, in the hopes of helping others. It should be a fun read for those who like seeing how computer science theory is applied in practice. We’ll cover a lot but each section builds upon the previous ones. By the end, you should hopefully have an understanding of the entire system.Before talking about our multiplayer protocol, it's useful to have some context about ...