I’ve been talking to my brother Andrew (a 7-kyu Go player) about Go over ActivityPub. My vision here is a modified version of kepi (or whatever) which lets you attach game moves to statuses in the same way that you can currently attach images. Replies can have game moves attached; we only need to pay attention to valid moves from the person originally tagged. But you should be able to play a game on the public timeline as well as in direct messages.
There has been some discussion on Sensei’s Library about distributed Go protocols. It’s rather dated and mostly discusses Jabber.
As to the format of the move data: several games, including Go and backgammon, have standard representations in the Smart Game Format (SGF). These represent the game as a whole, which might be overkill, but we can use a subset. Several good ideas were also given earlier in this thread.
Andrew adds
I hear that the BGA is currently looking for people to help write a new Go server aimed at children. I don’t know how far they’ve got so far, but it might be interesting to get in contact with them to ask if something like this would be useful.
which I intend to do next week.