There used to be a Plan 9 fork called 9ants (forked from 9front actually) which was developed by the late mycroftiv who setup a small grid computing thing for interested community members. The idea was all it provided basic shared 9P community services including a chat service where you would share media using a shared plumber (a message router).
To connect you would run a script called gridstart that mounted the remote resources in that windows namespace then start a sub rio running gridchat, Acme (text editor), page (document viewer) and the mothra web browser that only supports basic html, no js, css, etc. Gridchat was nothing special, it was pretty much IRC with a slight twist. It consisted of a shared buffer living on a 9p message queue server which everyone's client, an rc script, read and wrote to. Some users wrote their own chat client scripts and of course you could completely change how the grid behaved on your end - it was completely within your power to arrange those resources as you saw fit.
The idea was the plumber in that namespace lets a user plumb a message to everyones clients who were listening on that shared plumber. So if you plumbed a url in gridchat it would load in everyone's browser. you could upload an image file to the griddisk, plumb it and it opens in everyones page. Same with source code but Acme would open the file. It was like a primitive slack or discord where you could technically send images, gifs and urls.
All of it was built on Plan 9 tooling using the native 9P protocol and wired up using rc scripts, all of which is available out of the box. I think the only non-standard Plan 9 tool was was the general purpose message queue 9P server that happened to be the perfect tool to host the gridchat buffer. Sadly, Mycroftiv passed away and 9ants is no more but gridchat lives on sans the shared plumber stuff.
It was all about the protocol: 9P. Everything used the same 9P shaped plug and socket and the client was built up from base tooling. You as a client had complete control over the client portion. This was probably the best example of "protocols, not services" that I have ever seen.
To connect you would run a script called gridstart that mounted the remote resources in that windows namespace then start a sub rio running gridchat, Acme (text editor), page (document viewer) and the mothra web browser that only supports basic html, no js, css, etc. Gridchat was nothing special, it was pretty much IRC with a slight twist. It consisted of a shared buffer living on a 9p message queue server which everyone's client, an rc script, read and wrote to. Some users wrote their own chat client scripts and of course you could completely change how the grid behaved on your end - it was completely within your power to arrange those resources as you saw fit.
The idea was the plumber in that namespace lets a user plumb a message to everyones clients who were listening on that shared plumber. So if you plumbed a url in gridchat it would load in everyone's browser. you could upload an image file to the griddisk, plumb it and it opens in everyones page. Same with source code but Acme would open the file. It was like a primitive slack or discord where you could technically send images, gifs and urls.
All of it was built on Plan 9 tooling using the native 9P protocol and wired up using rc scripts, all of which is available out of the box. I think the only non-standard Plan 9 tool was was the general purpose message queue 9P server that happened to be the perfect tool to host the gridchat buffer. Sadly, Mycroftiv passed away and 9ants is no more but gridchat lives on sans the shared plumber stuff.
It was all about the protocol: 9P. Everything used the same 9P shaped plug and socket and the client was built up from base tooling. You as a client had complete control over the client portion. This was probably the best example of "protocols, not services" that I have ever seen.