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 was inspired by previous work such as ActivityPub, 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.

There is no “reference implementation” of PawPub, but winter is developing an implementation called 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.

• 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