I'm building a fanfiction archive and I was wondering whether I should add federation just to the forum or to the whole site and if I add it to the whole site whether or not ActivityPub would be a good fit, like is it possible using ActivityPub to share the load of hosting the files across different instances or is that something unrelated and it's only useful for typical social interactions?

It would help with sharing the load. If you want to see something similar in action, check out Ibis, the federated wiki alternative: https://github.com/Nutomic/ibis

Edit: I should add, the requests on your server would be reduced, but replicating stories from federated servers will add a load on your server's disk and ram, I believe.

Oooh what forum? :smiley:

Yeah, it will probably be nodebb.

Well my job here is done.

Let me know if you need help!

The clue of what ActivityPub is for is in the name: it is for publishing activities.

Some such activities could be that someone has written, updated, or commented on fanfiction stories. If you want to exchange that information between different sites, AP is very well suited for that.

Federation seems like another drama locus as different instance admins disagree about stuff. Have you been involved in fanfic hosting before? The difficulties are about the humans, not the software.

Regarding the OP, deja vu...

But about including ActivityPub to one's own site, if I may add, Wordpress, NeoDB and Threads have integrations to it, Tumblr considered it even if the idea was dropped later on, and Bridge Fedi is a thing for federating to/from Bluesky and other AT Protocol platforms. So if @PumpkinDrama@reddthat.com thinks it's within scope, go crazy, I'd say.