This is a simple application of AP but it really demonstrates the power of the technology.<p>For example, if HN implemented ActivityPub this comment could be directly replied to by users on Mastodon or PeerTube or any other AP service, directly from that interface. Like email, it just works.<p>IMO it genuinely represents the way we should be thinking about web applications and services.
Author here! Let's hope my little hobby server holds up against HN. :)<p>This was very much an experiment in building something that talks ActivityPub Server-to-Server. Chess happened to be a fun, not too difficult idea to get the experiment going. (The chess parts are largely built on existing work, such as chess.js and icons from the same set Wikipedia uses.)<p>Feel free to ask anything!
This is the exact type of experimentation and hacking I would expect from a technology that has a lot of potential and interest from devs. I hope ActivityPub and further decentralization efforts continue to gain mindshare.
In 2011 in Twitter, we wrote a prototype engine that would let you run tiny javascript programs in iframe "cards", which show up below the tweet where images do. The idea was that if you tweeted with #cardname, then twitter would include a card-program from the public card registry.<p>One of the first programs was a chess board which would stay up-to-date with all of the previous "moves" in a reply chain.<p>I guess as a (former) shareholder I probably benefited from twitter's switch from trying to knit together amazing primitives like this in favor of becoming an ads-driven behemoth, but the engineer in me is sad about all of the amazing projects that never released.
I love these low-key ways to play games over lightweight protocols. I know this is a bad example but Facebook Messenger used to have this but they took it away. Not sure why. It was one of the few things I actually enjoyed about it.
If the creator of this is reading this - can you please stop flipping the board every time we click 'Next move'? It makes it impossible to follow the game. Thanks
ActivityPub is still on my (ever-expanding) to-research list, but maybe I'll ask here: is this the protocol that will finally let me move my social networking into Emacs?