No, I don't think your model must necessarily have the same topology as the view. However, the "model" most certainly resembles a view model, it's not generally

No, I don't think your model must necessarily have the same topology as the view. However, the "model" most certainly resembles a view model, it's not generally something that you write to disk (although you could do it if you really wanted to). The difference between this model and the view model from MVVM is that in MVVM, the view model contains runtime objects and handles such as sockets, file handles, database connections, service locators and so on, whereas the model in the Elm philosophy keeps those elsewhere, in the realm of messages and updates.