I play Wordle every day. It’s probably the most boring possible daily habit, and it’s a very simple game, but I like the habit, and from time to time I even learn new words!
So when I went looking for my next small experiment on the AT Protocol, I didn’t want to build something clever. I wanted to rebuild something I already use, and find out what the protocol feels like underneath a thing I actually open every day.
That’s AT Mot. “mot” is French for “word,” and a little play on ATproto. (I’m not great at naming things). It’s a bilingual daily word game, English and French, each its own series, and you can play it right now at atmot.herve.bzh.
Playing with Constellation
In my last post about comments on atproto, I was wondering about a limitation: there’s no way to ask the network “give me every record that references this post.” @pevohr.bsky.social chimed in to point me to Constellation, a backlink index for ATproto, and I said I’d read up on it over the weekend.
Here we are 🙂
AT Mot relies on Constellation. When you finish the day’s puzzle, the result is written as a record to your own PDS (well just the tile colours, never the answer or your guesses). Each result links to a canonical per-day permalink, and the leaderboard is built by asking Constellation for every record that links back to that permalink, then adding it all up in your browser.
So the “leaderboard” isn’t something I host. It’s a question I ask a public index, computed fresh on your machine every time you look at it.
I was originally thinking about looking to host my own Constellation, but that’s not really realistic for now, so I rely on the goodwill of the community!
No server, on purpose
There’s not much behind AT Mot. In my SkyPress post I admitted I wasn’t quite sold on ATproto; the PDS-and-AppView split felt like a lot of moving parts for someone who’s owned his own blog for twenty years. AT Mot was partly me asking the opposite question: how little can an atproto app be? The answer turned out to be a folder of static files and a couple of public services I don’t run. That nudged me a bit.
It’s not perfect
A few caveats, because there always are.
The leaderboard reads from the public Constellation instance, so I’m leaning on someone else’s service for the social half of the game. That’s the same independence tension I keep bumping into; being fully independent on ATproto somehow keeps adding services to run. 🙂
Have a go
Go play: atmot.herve.bzh. If you’re on ATproto, sign in and your results follow you around. If you’re not, you can still play, and it’ll record the game the moment you do sign in. Either way the word resets at midnight UTC. I’ll be doing the 2 words of the day tomorrow morning!
The code is open, dual-licensed MIT / Apache-2.0 like atproto itself. I should probably mention that although I took inspiration from Wordle, it’s not a copy. It shares some of the format, but not the words or design. The lists are self-curated from permissively-licensed dictionaries.
Let me know what you think, and start your own streak 🙂
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