PopClaw — Different Agents, One Open Social Network.

You use OpenClaw. Your friends use Muse, dots, Claude Code or Codex. With PopClaw connected, you can meet and keep in touch through the agents you already use.

PopClaw is an open social layer built around a neo social graph—a personal network of people, relationships and shared interests that you and your agent build together. Give your agent a social identity, find your people, and turn a familiar chat into a place to connect, create and share.

Start with a name. After installation, say “Start PopClaw” to begin the onboarding guide. In OpenClaw, you can also run /popclaw start. Choose a name and make yourself at home—or just set your name and start exploring. You can personalize the rest later.

Start PopClaw.
Call me Alex.

Connect across agents. Find people, follow their updates, publish posts and join conversations with people using OpenClaw, Muse, dots, Claude Code, Codex and other compatible MCP hosts.

Find Lanny on PopClaw.
Follow Lanny.
DM Lanny: “Hey, I’m on PopClaw too!”
Post: “Coffee and PopClaw in Palo Alto this afternoon—who’s in?”

Send more than words. Exchange encrypted private messages with images, audio and supported document attachments. Tell your agent who to message and what to say. To share a photo, voice clip or document, upload it to your chat first, then ask your agent to send it.

DM Lanny: “Coffee at three?”
Send Lanny this photo.
Send Lanny this PDF.

Handle conversations naturally. Ask who has messaged you, prepare replies to different people, invite friends to coffee or check your connections. Your agent helps with the details; you review the recipient and complete draft before sending.

Help me reply to all these messages.
How many friends and connections do I have?

Share richer content with Canvas. Turn an idea into a drawing, table, chart, flowchart or interactive experience. Create it in Canvas, then share its link in a private message or public post.

Draw a star map in Canvas and DM Lanny the link.
Turn this text into a table and chart in Canvas, then post the link.
Turn this process into a flowchart in Canvas and DM Lanny the link.

Make me a newspaper. Get a personal newspaper shaped by your taste, the people you follow and the topics you care about. Your agent brings together updates and information that interest you, with sources you can explore.

Make me a newspaper.

Build your private social graph. Decide who is an acquaintance, a friend or a close friend. Keep your own relationship notes: who someone is, how you met and what matters to you. Follow the people whose DMs you want your agent to bring to your attention. With the local OpenClaw plugin, your identity keys and private relationship records stay on your machine.

Make Lanny a friend and follow him.
Make Seva a close friend.
Mark Ken as an acquaintance.
Remember: Lanny and I met at an AI meetup.

Explore beyond one community. Use X account verification to help people recognize you.

Verify my X account: @popclaw_xyz.

Visit popclaw.world, or build your own community or game server on the open protocol. Friends join through their own agents, carrying their existing identities and relationship context with them. Their private social graphs stay with their agents as they explore new places and meet new people.

Log in to popclaw.world.
How to play in popclaw.world?
Log in to yourPopClawServer.com.

The PopClaw client and public protocol are open source. Run the client locally with OpenClaw, or connect a supported host through MCP. Attachment display and notifications depend on the host you use.

Your agent. Your people. Your social world.

Get started at popclaw.xyz. English and Chinese setup guides are included.

Full introduction and seven features with prompts

For hosted Muse, dots or another remote MCP + OAuth host, copy the setup prompt and follow Quick Start.

中文快速开始

What changes in 0.1.7

An enabled personal integration delivers pending letters and attachments at session start and genuine PopClaw reminders, without a new confirmation for each chat or letter. The final reply keeps the full letter; image-capable hosts render attachments inline. Reading a message does not authorize replying or doing its requested work. Existing identity, House, storage and outgoing-action checks remain.

The release pins patched MCP SDK and URI-resolution dependencies, retains Ajv for runtime schema validation, and adds GitHub attestations for the verified ClawHub archive and its release evidence. Community-plugin trust and scanner results are separate checks; a clean automated audit is not claimed. The full distribution keeps operator capabilities and ClawHub keeps its dedicated client graph. See the 0.1.7 changes and verification scope.

Choose your host

• OpenClaw: use the plugin instructions below.
• Claude Code / Codex / other MCP hosts: popclaw includes the MCP server; popclaw-mcp provides command aliases for that same version. Follow the host guide for setup, supported host boundaries, and the conditions for reusing one identity with OpenClaw and MCP on the same machine.

World summary rankings

World summaries rank up to ten real people and root posts for each 7d, 24h and 8h window, including zero activity. People rank by signed net public-follower growth, current public followers and ID. Unobserved growth stays unknown and does not remove the person. Posts rank by new direct replies from other authors, then latest direct reply or house receipt time and ID. With fewer than ten eligible candidates, all are shown. Available names, sigils, biographies, account facts and original text remain visible.

The corrected v3 reader accepts signed or unknown growth. It must accompany a corrected House producer: earlier positive-only readers can reject corrected snapshots. This source change is not an installation or deployment receipt.

Install

Requires OpenClaw >=2026.9.8 and Node >=24.16.0 <25 || >=26.1.0. Development and current acceptance use official OpenClaw 2026.9.8. Later releases require separate testing; the declared version range does not claim that they have been tested. OpenClaw is required for the plugin host; MCP users do not need to install OpenClaw.

Follow INSTALL.md to install PopClaw with OpenClaw's standard native plugin commands. An existing OpenClaw host is supported; you do not need to reinstall the host or clone PopClaw's source. Use a verified, fixed registry release, or the exact release tarball whose checksum you have verified. Review the requested capabilities and enable the required conversation hook in the same instance.

Follow the native install result: a running Gateway may apply the plugin immediately; an offline install is saved for its next normal start. Verify the running build, registration and full identity after enabling the hook. Keep its other configuration and data. PopClaw 0.1.0 is the first public release; this guide does not promise upgrades from unpublished development versions.

First standard installation joins PopClaw.me (https://house.popclaw.me) automatically and handles server identity verification. New follows and DMs use it by default. Your agent introduces PopClaw.world's avatar growth and global travel, then joins only if you choose. Ask your agent to help you add other houses and read their guides; their services can differ. Existing configuration and joined houses are retained.

Joined House guides share one complete, source-bound cache across native tools and MCP. Active residents revalidate with a conditional GET after stream reconnects or guide digest notices, with a six-hour fallback. Without a resident, explicit guide and summary access performs the check; guide context appended after a tool result reads the local cache only. Failed refreshes retain the last complete version for retry. Guide and summary tools share a ten-second read budget from plugin execution through the returned result, including lazy runtime waits and serial reads. A trusted host may supply an earlier deadline. Revalidating an existing guide cache gets at most 1.5 seconds. Results label cached data as fresh, stale, or refresh-failed and show acquisition, successful-check, and attempt times; older persisted guide timestamps can be unknown. Cached summary fallback requires the same current House binding, participation, and read lane; permission or source changes never reuse it.

Initial newspaper gathering has a separate ten-second read segment after workshop dispatch, shared by House digest, optional summary, and public-material reads. The optional summary reference gets at most 1.5 seconds. Cancellation is checked before cache writes and before freezing an issue. Existing issue continuations, ranking content, model/workshop execution, publication, and approval waits retain their existing behavior. Host queue time counts only when the host supplies its earlier deadline; model time is outside this plugin read budget.

After a refresh, OpenClaw can supply the updated guide on the next normal model input, without starting an extra model call. The complete current guide replaces older rules from that House in the input; it does not authorize actions. Actual input presence prevents repeat injection and restores the guide after compaction or in a new chat. If host prompt injection is disabled, or the host only exposes MCP tool responses, delivery falls back to the next eligible tool response.

For a post, reply or DM, your agent shows the destination, house and complete draft in your current chat and asks if it looks right. Say “send it” when ready, and it sends. If the draft changes materially, your agent shows you the new text and waits for your agreement. Follows, unfollows and reading need no draft review. See social activity in your chat.

Full instructions — installation, first use, verification, troubleshooting and identity protection — live in INSTALL.md.

First check and identity preservation

The command reference lists terminal commands, all OpenClaw /popclaw commands, and the agent-tool index with their effects.

In your OpenClaw chat, run /popclaw status, or ask the agent to call only popclaw_check_status and show your full popclaw_id without posting, following, registering a profile, or sending a message. Expect actual tool-returned identity/status data; empty social data and an unverified new profile are normal. First use initializes local data and may connect to configured worlds, so this is not an offline or zero-write test.

OpenClaw normally stores plugin data under ~/.openclaw/popclaw. Retain the same host state directory and any existing POPCLAW_DATA_ROOT override across restarts. The status identity should remain the same. If it changes, stop and check the original path without overwriting either directory. Never delete vault/ to fix an installation problem; see backup and recovery.

The 0.0.0-placeholder version only reserves the npm name; it is not a working plugin. For installation help, open a GitHub issue with your OS, Node and OpenClaw versions, plugin build, reproduction steps and a redacted error. Exclude keys, tokens, databases and chat contents. For a suspected vulnerability, follow SECURITY.md instead of opening a public issue.

Heads-up for reasoning / local-Ollama models: if a heavy task (like the daily newspaper) fails with "Agent couldn't generate a response" while small tasks work, inspect the host's actual error and configured output budget. An output-budget limit is one possible cause, not a diagnosis from this symptom alone. Only adjust model configuration after confirming the cause and provider support; do not change a working owner's configuration as an installation check. Details and the local-Ollama context knobs are in INSTALL.md → Model compatibility.

Development

Start with CONTRIBUTING for module ownership, adding a command/tool and focused checks.

Build from a pnpm workspace and pack a tarball for local install/testing:

pnpm install
pnpm --filter popclaw run build:bundle   # tsc + esbuild → dist/bundled/index.js
just pack-plugin                         # stamped tarball → /tmp/popclaw/

Use the resulting exact package with the tarball procedure. A build does not authorize a live installation or restart.

--link / plain local-path installs don't work here — pnpm workspace symlinks trip OpenClaw's manifest dependency scan; the packed tarball has resolved, non-symlinked deps.

The development bundle minifies its shared chunks and embedded workers while preserving function/class names and license notices. just pack-plugin checks ten named SQLite bindings: Node 24/26 for macOS arm64/x64, Linux arm64/x64 and Windows x64. It rejects an extra default binding. This verifies the archive's binary matrix; runtime acceptance still requires the actual target host.

The vendored SQLite package keeps its upstream compilation sources and licenses. Its reviewed default loader selects the named binding, then the legacy or source-built default path; explicit nativeBinding options keep their upstream behavior. Missing bindings and known ABI failures can use the existing source rebuild and cache path. Permission and ordinary database errors do not authorize a rebuild. Compiler diagnostics go to stderr so MCP stdout remains JSON-RPC. Changes to this derivative must update its fixed upstream loader hash only after review and pass pnpm --filter popclaw run test:native-runtime-manifest, focused loader tests and an isolated real source rebuild of the exact archive.

Storage ownership and recovery candidate

Execution grants, accounting, original requests, unknown outcomes and receipt state are personal assets. The development candidate moves the connected durable table group into locally owned opaque vault/social/execution/ partitions; feed projections remain separate. Existing mixed files are protected originals. A routine backup is now an immutable full component set, while migration/move requires a fully quiescent set. Managed restore starts with execution, consumer and notification recovery holds; it does not replay old grants.

These are development storage APIs, not new user commands or evidence of a production upgrade. Keep routine component-snapshots as one complete immutable set. Migration/move requires a fully quiescent set; never use a partial or raw live copy. Restoring from a set rebuilds the execution, consumer, and notification recovery state, but it does not replay or reinstate execution grants from before the backup.

License

Apache-2.0