How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)

https://www.figma.com/blog/how-figmas-multiplayer-technology-works/

by redbell • 11 months ago

176 54 11 months ago

figma.com

bogwog• 11 months ago

Interesting article, but why does it randomly switch from dark to light mode once you scroll past a certain point?

krisknez• 11 months ago

Because it's cool

koakuma-chan• 11 months ago

What is the meaning of life?

simultsop3• 11 months ago

the guy behind a kabuki mask, stole my microbots

rudi-c• 11 months ago

The contents of this article are pretty old, but the static website's design has been revamped (I believe several times) since then. My guess it that the two may have just fallen out of sync in such a way that this particular oddity manifests.

Traubenfuchs• 11 months ago

...and why does the switch point have a small hysteresis?

tobyjsullivan• 11 months ago

It changes when I scroll to the animations.

My guess is they implemented dark mode, then discovered some legacy posts have videos with transparent backgrounds. As a quick fix, they decided to disable dark mode anytime someone scrolls down to a video.

Seems like one of those compromises to solve an 11th-hour bug.

654wak654• 11 months ago

The videos have white backgrounds, maybe it's to match that and keep the page cleaner.

rakag• 11 months ago

Haha getting flashbanged halfway through

guluarte• 11 months ago

Why is their CTO suspended on Twitter https://x.com/evanwallace ?

echelon• 11 months ago

What happened? Is there a story behind this?

meowtimemania• 11 months ago

IIRC there was a period of time where you could get suspended for trivial things like mentioning twitter

freeqaz• 11 months ago

This is still a hard problem today. Some hard tech was built for this. I'm excited for a world where this is more accessible and less hardcore than something like CRDTs (in terms of accessibility).

How have others noticed the world shifting in the past 6 years?

simultsop3• 11 months ago

There were some additional posts regarding the topic by same guy. https://hachyderm.io/@evanw

Innovators like him, are very rare.

asnyder• 11 months ago

I know Liveblocks.io has been making this very easy and accessible over the last few years. They recently introduced AI, and are promoting that of course, but as I understand it multiplayer collaboration (https://liveblocks.io/multiplayer-editing) is their meat and potatoes.

Not affiliated with Liveblocks, just aware of its existence.

ctnicholas• 11 months ago

I work at Liveblocks—yes! Our founders were inspired by Figma and wanted to make it possible for others to build apps like this more easily. We provide our own sync engine, Storage, which is aimed at this use case.

wrren• 11 months ago

Elixir's Phoenix LiveView + PubSub covers a lot of these bases out of the box.

thruflo2• 11 months ago

PubSub and LiveView do go a long way. However, broadcast isn't sync and LiveView isn't appropriate for all applications.

Phoenix recently added Phoenix.Sync [0], a sync engine library explicitly designed [1] to address this. In combination with a front-end library like TanStack DB [2] it goes much further towards giving you a Figma/Linear-style sync engine out of the box [3].

[0] https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix_sync [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4IWShnVuRCg [2] https://electric-sql.com/blog/2025/07/29/local-first-sync-wi... [3] https://electric-sql.com/demos/burn

Disclaimer: Electric founder. Linking to my own talk / post / demo.

danielvaughn2• 11 months ago

There are now a few sync engines that tackle this problem. Rocicorp Zero, Electric SQL, and one or two others. By no means a crowded space, but there are options now.

edit: links

  https://zero.rocicorp.dev/
  https://electric-sql.com/

reb• 11 months ago

Have you had a chance to use either of these yet? Electric looks like an obvious mature choice — curious if you think Zero's approach is compelling enough to be worth trying in alpha

andrewmcwatters3• 11 months ago

All the fundamentals have existed for at least 26 years. So, no, not really.

It's also really weird to use video game terminology and ignore the fact that all of the approaches used in this article have in fact, been done by major game engines, are readily documented in game development circles, etc.

It reads like an undergrad discovering game development for the first time. None of this is novel. It wasn't even novel for a web or desktop application to use.

partdavid• 11 months ago

Can you say more about which prior art you think overlaps here? We have a similar use case to Figma and are implementing a similar solution. I'm not particularly concerned whether the path we're following is novel but I am particularly concerned with whether there are gotchas along it that we should be watching out for, so if there are more mature solutions, we'd be interested.

Rohansi2• 11 months ago

I also found it weird. They're basically doing what multiplayer games do but for a web app. Not the typical way you'd build your web backend but nothing actually new... not even using CRDTs, just inspired by them.

winrid• 11 months ago

Sharedb/racer solved this like 10yrs ago. You get synchronized snapshots, conflict resolition, diffs, change tracking..

1zael• 11 months ago

Evan Wallace basically said screw it, I'm writing a custom WebGL renderer and multiplayer protocol, when everyone else was slapping together existing libraries. Most of us would have built a janky Electron app and called it a day. Instead they went nuclear on performance because that WAS their product differentiation.

eddythompson80• 11 months ago

Curious why you copy/paste your previous comments verbatim[1]. I was reading it and could have sworn I have read that exact comment before and was thinking it's dejavu.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44438131

dsnr• 11 months ago

Haha, I had the exact same feeling, like I had read the same comment before. Glad to know I’m not losing my mind :)

simultsop3• 11 months ago

maybe an automated bot

bullen3• 11 months ago

I think player is a misnomer here. Multiuser editing would be better.

Also websockets are complicated. So are WebRTC or HTTP/2+ solutions.

HTTP/1.1 Comet-Stream is still the silver bullet even when ISPs try to block them, it's the protocol that goes through best (99.6% in 2022)

I'm considering doing a multi-socket solution: 80 (HTTP Comet-Stream) and 3724 (Binary TCP because WoW).

https://multiplayeronlinestandard.com

bobbylarrybobby• 11 months ago

They've likened their product to a game engine, so multiplayer seems appropriate.

bullen3• 11 months ago

Maybe if you can se other users actions in real-time? I'm not a visual guy so it was a long time since I tried Figma.

dang• 11 months ago

Discussed at the time:

How Figma's Multiplayer Technology Works - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21378858 - Oct 2019 (63 comments)

dostick• 11 months ago

Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea. Back then everyone used Sketch and wanted better prototyping and interaction design, and Figma appeared with its real time collaboration as major point which you used once just to try and never again.

Figma is one of the worst evils of corporate capitalism. The design oriented development is long ceases, mainly focusing on making new useless products because they need growth for shareholders. Considered a leader in UIUX design software while its own UIUX is abysmal, full of amateur level mistakes, inconsistencies and bad patterns. We have now a generation of designers that take Figma’s UX as an example to learn from and implement in their designs.

aswan• 11 months ago

Figma was born out of founder’s need to find a proof of concept test case for real-time collaboration JavaScript engine they created. They stumbled on this idea.

citation needed?

The article discusses adding collaboration to an existing application, the opposite of what this comment asserts.

thruflo2• 11 months ago

Just to say if you're interested in this kind of tech and are in the Bay Area, Sync Conf [0] just announced [1] its initial speaker lineup today and Arushi Bandi from Figma is one of the speakers.

[0] https://syncconf.dev [1]: https://x.com/sync_conf/status/1957818840777122293

seereadhack• 11 months ago

Linear's write ups / talks on real-time sync are also very good, if a bit old now.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WxK11RsLqp4&t=2169s

2. https://linear.app/now/scaling-the-linear-sync-engine

Also see this overview of related tech here:

3. https://gist.github.com/pesterhazy/3e039677f2e314cb77ffe3497...

And c.f. automerge from ink & switch:

4.https://automerge.org/blog/

goodthink• 11 months ago

https://github.com/croquet/croquet makes all of this dead simple, without the need for any backend code/servers/databases/CRDTs &etc

https://multisynq.io if you want a worldwide reflector network.

mbrumlow• 11 months ago

If they don’t use CRDTs what will they put on their resume?

mandeepj• 11 months ago

Doesn’t Google docs and MS 365 have very similar tech?

jelling• 11 months ago

Yes and MSFT sells it on Azure as Signal iirc

CharlieDigital• 11 months ago

Microsoft has multiple variants on Azure.

Web PubSub[0] is a low level, scalable web sockets backend.

SignalR[1] is a higher level tool on top of web sockets that has support for some higher level abstractions like groups.

Fluid Relay[2] is probably the one closest to this tech that any team could take "off the shelf" to achieve similar features using their open source Fluid Framework[3] client. My understanding is Fluid Relay powers some of Microsoft's own collaborative products. Not sure if other direct users of this service.

[0] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/web-pubsub

[1] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/signalr-service

[2] https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/products/fluid-relay

[3] https://fluidframework.com/

Sincere6066• 11 months ago

figma balls

puff_pastry• 11 months ago

Genuinely curious, do a lot of people use these multiplayer features? I always thought of design as (mostly) a solo endeavour

wahnfrieden• 11 months ago

Demos

remus• 11 months ago

We'll often do design reviews in figma, that usually means a few people looking at the same doc and potentially a few people making tweaks at the same time. Usually in separate bits of the doc at the same time.

How Figma’s multiplayer technology works (2019)

Related Stories