ActivityPub is a general protocol for decentralised social networking. Instead of Facebook or Twitter servers generating a feed for each user, user's servers send updates to each-other.

Hi! Spritely's main author here. Spritely is taking on quite a few things, so it's understandable that it might not be completely clear what from the tagline.

Here's the short version: we'd like to bring better security, privacy, and rich interactions to the federated social web. I was one of the co-authors of the ActivityPub standard so I have some strong opinions about what it's capable of that isn't happening yet.

If you want a friendly, semi-visual overview, here's a video I just recorded for the ActivityPub conference: https://conf.tube/videos/watch/18aa2f92-36cc-4424-9a4f-6f2de...

It goes over (most of) the layers in a fairly friendly way.

Within all the subprojects listed, the most ambitious is the Fantasary one, which is distributed virtual worlds. Not as out there as it sounds, such a thing was built in the mid/late 90s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNiePoNiyvE

But in the dot-com crash, went up in flames. However many of the ideas were carried forward by the object capability community, particularly the E language, on which Spritely Goblins is heavily influenced: http://www.erights.org/

The distributed games goal then becomes a driver for the other components, so even if that fails we should hopefully still get cool stuff. Spritely Goblins, the foundational layer, already exists and has support for such features as time travel debugging: https://dustycloud.org/blog/goblins-time-travel-micropreview...

and distributed networked programming, safe to run in a hostile network... here's a chat program where the "protocol" authenticates the users joining the channel and also that the messages came from them, with the chatroom and user "protocol" both written in 250 lines of code combined... and without being planned at all for networked interaction, it just worked over the network... here's a gif of it working over Tor Onion Services: https://dustycloud.org/misc/goblins-chat-captp-onion-service...

No code was added to the "protocol" to expect network interactions; Goblins' CapTP (Capability Transport Protocol) took care of that for us.

Already that should sound pretty cool, but that's just the foundation for the system. Look at the other subprojects to see where we're going from there.

Happy to answer questions if anyone has them!

It appears to be both a game and a messenger, sort of like a distributed MMO.

Edit: Someone please correct me if I've misunderstood.