Honours Thesis

An Investigation into ActivityPub Infrastructure and Conformance.

By Daniel Lay

Supervised by: Rahul Gopinath

Abstract

Social Web is a key way for decentralised social interaction in the modern world. However, while the protocol is decentralised, it fails to fulfill its promise as running an instance incurs significant cost requiring a back-end server running 24/7. Hence, participators have relied on centralised services such as Mastodon, a non-ideal situation. Hence, a truly decentralised solution is needed.

In this project, we propose a novel approach that combines static site hosting with the ActivityPub protocol. Our insight here is that we can serve the content that we generate from a static website. For the interactive aspects of the social network, we can also rely on the ActivityPub protocol, which allows late delivery of messages, and hence does not require a server to be available online 24×7.

To validate the system, a comprehensive set of test suites were developed, which provided above 90% code coverage of ActivityPub as tested on Mastodon and Honk. These test cases evaluate the system’s functional compliance with ActivityPub, providing a practical solution for hosting decentralised social platforms without continuous backend dependencies.

Using our project, users can participate in social web using ActivityPub protocol without having to invest in costly always-on servers. Hence, this research enables decentralised social media discourse, enabling ActivityPub to fulfill its promise of a truly decentralized solution for individual users. Our solution allows users to also sidestep the often arbitrary participation policies of centralised servers and offers users better control over their data with reduced operational overhead.