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ArchivePub 1.0 — the federation protocol is final

by The Artist Alley team

  • federation
  • archivepub
  • protocol

ArchivePub — the ActivityPub-shaped federation protocol that lets independently-operated DAM instances share assets, reviews, and workflow state — is now at v1.0 (final), stamped 2026-07-13.

v1.0 is a spec-only change: no new wire format, no code. It ratifies the exact protocol surface that shipped as v1.0-rc1, after the 7-day release-candidate soak window closed clean on 2026-06-22. The Appendix A conformance test vectors, locked at rc1, carry through unchanged.

How it got here

ArchivePub grew alongside Artist Alley’s federation arc, tracked in the spec’s own change log:

  • v0.1 (2026-06-09) captured the protocol at the point per-actor inbox/outbox delivery shipped — the signed JSON envelope, the aa: activity/object vocabulary, and content-addressed cas:// references.
  • v0.2 → v0.8 built out the encryption arc: per-user X25519 keypairs, encryption-key distribution, peer capability negotiation, the per-recipient NaCl-box envelope, receiver-side decryption with a retained-key rotation window, sender refusal for restricted/embargo tiers, and key-rotation lifecycle (see ADR 0049).
  • v1.0-rc1 (2026-06-15) was the cap-stone — the receiver-side encryption gate activated — and locked the conformance vectors.

The aa: namespace prefix, reserved as “may change” during the draft window, was finalised at rc1 and is now stable.

What “final” means for implementers

  • The wire format is frozen. The envelope (@context: https://artist-alley.org/protocol/v1, Ed25519 signature over RFC-8785 canonical JSON), the aa: vocabulary, the capability-negotiation handshake, and the NaCl-box encryption block are stable at v1.0. Future revisions follow standard major.minor.patch semantics — a breaking wire change would require a major bump.
  • Conformance is defined. An implementation claiming ArchivePub conformance MUST pass the locked Appendix A scenarios (01, 05, 06, 07, 08, 09, 11, 12) against a peer running the reference implementation.
  • Pin your references. Implementers building against ArchivePub should pin to a specific commit of the spec and of the reference implementation (Artist Alley, see app/internal/federation/).

The spec currently lives in the OSS repo (docs/protocol/archivepub.md) and will move to a dedicated home when it settles into a versioned-changelog cadence. For the protocol overview — envelope shape, trust model, and the sharing lifecycle — see the ArchivePub page.