Philip, a founder of the open‑source Tiptap editor, released Hocuspocus five years ago to plug a gap in real‑time collaboration. Built on Kevin Jahns’ Yjs CRDT library, the server synchronises edits without conflicts and can handle any structured data, not just text. It works with editors such as Slate, Quill, Monaco or ProseMirror.

Hocuspocus v4 released under the MIT license drops the Node‑only ws dependency in favor of the universal crossws adapter. The change lets the same binary run on Node, Bun, Deno, Cloudflare Workers and even uWebSockets, opening edge‑deployment scenarios. New hooks carry a generic Context for type‑safe auth, updates queue per connection, and transaction origins become structured objects.

Tiptap bundles Hocuspocus as the collaboration backend for its cloud service, but any Yjs client can connect via the @hocuspocus/server package. Documentation lives at hocuspocus.dev, and a hosted option is offered through Tiptap Collab. Community support runs on Discord, and contributors are listed in the repo’s CONTRIBUTING file.

Built‑in extensions add SQLite persistence and Redis‑backed scaling, enabling thousands of concurrent users without sacrificing consistency. Production teams cite the sequential queue as a fix for prior ordering bugs under load.