Guides by Task

Pick the thing you are trying to do. Each guide links to the specs and platform source it relies on.

Get federating

I want to…	Read
Stand up a minimal server that federates (tested against GoToSocial in CI)	Your First ActivityPub Server
Publish an actor other servers can find and follow	Building an Actor, WebFinger
Accept activities safely	Handling Incoming Activities, Verifying Requests
Send activities and have Mastodon accept them	Sending Activities, HTTP Signatures
Add ActivityPub to an existing website	Adding ActivityPub to Your Homepage
Figure out why something doesn't work	Troubleshooting by Symptom

Build social features

I want to…	Read
Get followed by a Mastodon user	Following and Followers, Mastodon Compatibility
Publish posts that show up in timelines	Posts and Replies
Make replies thread, and fetch missing replies	Threads, Replies and Backfill
Support quote posts and reply controls	Quote Posts and Interaction Policies
Notify people I mention, or send a private message	Mentions and Hashtags, Direct Messages
Attach images and video	Media Attachments
Handle likes, boosts, polls and custom emoji	Likes and Shares, Polls, Custom Emoji

Run it in production

I want to…	Read
Delete posts and accounts so the deletion actually propagates	Deletion
Let users move accounts between servers	Account Migration, Keys and Identity
Deliver to thousands of servers without falling over	Delivery at Scale, Scaling and Performance
Moderate, block and report	Content Moderation
Require signed fetches (authorized fetch)	Authorized Fetch
Rotate keys or support Ed25519	Keys and Identity
Test my implementation	Testing Your Implementation, Testing & Debugging tools

Interoperate with a platform

I want to work with…	Read
Mastodon	Mastodon Compatibility
Lemmy	Lemmy Compatibility
Pixelfed	Pixelfed Compatibility
PeerTube	PeerTube Compatibility
Threads, Ghost, WordPress, Bluesky (via Bridgy Fed), NodeBB, Discourse	Big Platforms