https://lwn.net/Articles/960912/
'Spritely is a project seeking to build a platform for sovereign distributed
applications — applications where users run their own nodes in order to control
their own data — as the basis of a new social internet. While there are many
such existing projects, Spritely takes an unusual approach based on a new
interoperable protocol for efficient, secure remote procedure calls (RPC). The
project is in its early stages, with many additional features planned, but it
is already possible to play around with Goblins, the distributed actor library
that Spritely intends to build on.
The Spritely project states its long-term goal as building "a new architecture
for the internet: removing the necessity of client-server architecture,
replacing it with a participatory peer-centric model". The project is working
toward a future where many different distributed applications communicate over
the same protocol, and users' data is contained on their own devices. The
Spritely Institute — the charitable organization which provides funding for the
Spritely project — presents this vision as "social media done right". An early
example is visible in the form of
Fantasary, a distributed, collaborative,
text-based virtual world initially built for the 2023 Spring Lisp Game Jam.
There is also
Goblin Chat, a simple chat application demonstrating what it
might be like to write a distributed chat application using Spritely's
libraries.
Christine Lemmer-Webber, the founder of the project and a co-author of the
ActivityPub specification, initially phrased the goal of the project as
"building the next generation of the fediverse as a distributed game". She
noted that while ActivityPub was a great success, "there are a few things that
bother me". She views the Spritely project as a chance to correct some of the
shortcomings of ActivityPub and focus on building a social environment that
permits rich interactions.
Lemmer-Webber is not alone in believing that a better foundational architecture
for distributed systems is possible. The Spritely Institute has a grant from
the NLnet Foundation to work on creating a specification for a protocol called
OCapN (short for "Object Capability Network"). Jessica Tallon, another
ActivityPub co-author, is one of several people being paid by that grant to
further develop Spritely. In an interview, she said that she hoped the project
could make OCapN a new foundational layer of the internet which not only
permits the creation of performant peer-to-peer applications, but that makes
decentralization "the natural way to develop" applications on the web.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
