activitypub-testing: a test runner for ActivityPub Actors

Hey everyone. I hope the new year has been good to everyone.

I'd like to announce
<https://socialweb.coop/activitypub-testing/announcement/> the
activitypub-testing <https://socialweb.coop/activitypub-testing/> project.

activitypub-testing is a test runner for ActivityPub Actors.

The goal of this release is to bring the project to the attention of anyone
who is interested in testing ActivityPub Actors so they can follow the
project, solicit light testing of the tools and software, and start to
collect issues about how it works, when it doesn't work, and what other
ways people might like it to work.

The project homepage has a Getting Started
<https://socialweb.coop/activitypub-testing/#getting-started> section with
usage and installation instructions for the `activitypub-testing` command
line interface (aka 'CLI'), which I expect may be the most common interface
for ActivityPub implementation developers, shell scripters, or anyone else
who feels comfortable on a posix command
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_(computing)> line.

There is also a web UI for activitypub-testing. The Web UI is rendered by
an HTML Custom Element called `activitypub-actor-tester
<https://bengo.is/activitypub/projects/activitypub-actor-tester/README/>`.
You can see a demo of this at
https://socialweb.coop/activitypub/actor/tester/ which has HTML like
`<activitypub-actor-tester test="true"
actor="/"></activitypub-actor-tester>`.

activitypub-testing-website is a subpackage within activitypub-testing that
is a proof of concept of using activitypub-testing as a library in a
website, e.g. to make a web page for each test case or conformance
requirement. An example deployment of activitypub-testing-website is hosted
at https://activitypub-testing-website.socialweb.coop/

Find source code mirrors for the activitypub-testing subprojects at
https://codeberg.org/socialweb.coop/

My hope for testing in the ActivityPub ecosystem is that all kinds of
persons or other actors can be ActivityPub testers, e.g. developers of an
ActivityPub implementation, everyday end-users who control an Actor hosted
by a service provider they expect to conform to the protocol, or
professional conformance testers doing ongoing conformance assessment
<https://www.nist.gov/standardsgov/conformity-assessment-basics>.
Furthermore, I hope that there is abundant experimentation, competition,
consistency, and interoperability amongst many testing tools. We should be
inspired by the WAI Conformance Evaluation
<https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/conformance/> ecosystem and others.
<https://www.w3.org/WAI/test-evaluate/conformance/>

-- bengo

Thanks to bumblefudge <bumblefudge@learningproof.xyz> and codenamedmitri <
dzagidulin@gmail.com> for cooperating on this.
Thanks to evanpro <evan@prodromou.name> for offering support while testing
onepage.pub + activitypub-testing.
Thanks to Christine Lemmer-Webber for amongst other things, building and
hosting an initial testing tool 5+ years ago and for convening
<https://socialhub.activitypub.rocks/t/the-activitypub-test-suite/290> many
helpful discussions about its evolution.