ActivityPub provides two layers:

A server to server federation protocol (so decentralized websites can share information)
A client to server protocol (so users, including real-world users, bots, and other automated processes, can communicate with ActivityPub using their accounts on servers, from a phone or desktop or web application or whatever)

ActivityPub implementations can implement just one of these things or both of them. However, once you've implemented one, it isn't too many steps to implement the other, and there are a lot of benefits to both (making your website part of the decentralized social web, and being able to use clients and client libraries that work across a wide variety of social websites).

In ActivityPub, a user is represented by "actors" via the user's accounts on servers. User's accounts on different servers correspond to different actors. Every Actor has:

An inbox: How they get messages from the world
An outbox: How they send messages to others