Relay by System 3 is a new plugin that brings true multiplayer functionality to Obsidian. You can share folders with other Obsidian users, and then collaborate in real time with live cursors. Try it out.
Relay uses CRDTs to enable conflict-free team editing:
in real time — you can edit the same paragraph/sentence/word at the same time without data loss
asynchronously — if you’re offline or have a slow connection, your edits will be merged smoothly when you come back on
We think that Obsidian was born to be multiplayer. Obsidian is a tool for thinking, and thinking is a team sport. When you consider language models and AI agents, this becomes even more true. That’s why we’re building Relay.
About us
We’re two people: Dan, a software engineer, and Matt (me), a product manager and therapist. We’ve both left our tech jobs and are attempting to make a sustainable business building tools for thought that are good for the soul. System 3
It’s early days for Relay. We’d love for you to try it out and tell us what you think. There’s a lot of iterating to do and your input will make a difference.
Wow, that looks incredible. I probably won’t use it, because I don’t have the need to. But I can definitely see the use of this plugin, and would be willing to pay for it. I’ll keep it in mind and who knows, maybe I can use this plugin in the future.
For me because i have some experince with CRDTs there is a way to setup a server and host it on glitch.com for free (you won’t hit the free tier limit unless you are a big big team because you can make 4k requests an hour)
i like this approch even if i am not collaborating with anyone because this means your devices will have the same documents and your changes on any device won’t be lost
the plugin above from what i read dosen’t expose self hosting options
Edit:
they say they won’t release the server code also it shouldn’t be hard to make a yjs sync server i made one in few days there is open source servers you can connect to this plugin but you might need to change the code a little bit
