# PawPub documentation

**PawPub** is an experimental web-based protocol for federated social media. It's designed to be easy to understand and (relatively) simple to implement, while still being featureful and extensible enough to support rich social software. Its creator [winter](https://winter.entities.org.uk/) was inspired by previous work such as [ActivityPub](https://activitypub.rocks/), but PawPub is a fundamentally different protocol and is not compatible with any other similar project.

This site is a work in progress but aims to document the PawPub protocol at a technical level (serving as an equivalent for a formal specification), as well as to provide implementation notes and best practices. Implementers should follow the specifications as closely as possible to avoid mysterious incompatibilities.

## Index

- [Objects](objects)
    - [Actors](objects/actor)
    - [Notes](objects/note)
    - [Interactions](objects/interaction)
    - [Extensions](objects/extension)
    - [Tombstones](objects/tombstone)
- [Instance metadata](instance-meta)
- [WebFinger](webfinger)

## Digitigrade

There is no "reference implementation" of PawPub, but winter is developing *an* implementation called [Digitigrade](https://codeberg.org/winter/digitigrade) in order to test out the protocol in a real world application. Although it is not a reference implementation (i.e. the code quality or spec conformance isn't guaranteed) you're welcome to read through some of its code if you like.

## Why is it called that

- i like paws (i am a furry)
- it's a publication protocol (in the same vein as ActivityPub or LitePub or whatever else)
- i didn't have any better ideas
- it's quite memorable

## Copyright

Everything on this website (pawpub.entities.org.uk) is copyright of [winter](https://winter.entities.org.uk/) and is made available under the terms of the [CC BY-NC-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) licence, which means you can use it for pretty much any purpose, as long as you give appropriate credit, publish any derivative works under the same licence, and don't make money off of it.

[jankwiki](https://codeberg.org/winter/jankwiki), the software which powers this site, is dedicated to the public domain.