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.
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.
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.
Sometimes you have to do the wrong thing for a while to find the right thing. The nice thing about ActivityPub (or any federated protocol) is no one can just unilaterally shut down a project like this through policy or API changes that, whoops, prevent this use case.
The wonderful modular world you saw was only delayed, and now it's going to happen with much cheaper CPU, transfer, and storage.
I tried a similar idea, but for security reasons I tried to develop a DSL that would "compile" to CSS/HTML/JS instead of allowing authors/developers to write JS. I gave up (not only was it to difficult for me to maintain the codebase) but also because I realized most "cards" would just be ad-driven junk with poor UX and UI that would try and get personal info. from users.
Didn't Google try something similar with their homepage once? It was unsafe though because you had people submitting JS and having it execute it other people's browsers.
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.
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.