I've been curious about approaches to implementing #ActivityPub, when it hit me the other day that maybe I've been thinking about everything backwards.

Maybe instead of trying to create actors and inboxes, I should first create a really basic thing that constructs JSON blobs that match all requisite protocol fields.

I could basically create "fake" messages that aren't associated with a real Actor entity, then once that's done, I can attach them to simple real Actors and dispatch messages

Of course, in order to dispatch the messages, I'd have to build the inbox and outbox and figure out how to make that work correctly...

But in theory I could build an extremely simple messaging server with no UI or features other than just posting back and forth using an interactive interpreter

@lain do you have any thoughts on this? How did you initially start building out federation in the beginning?

Maybe @cwebber has an opinion