Orbit is a modern communication platform built on IRC. It is not an IRC client. It is a polished client layer, a voice/video service, and a file storage gateway, orchestrated into one cohesive product over infrastructure communities have trusted for thirty years.
Everything your friend group needs from Discord, privately, on a $5 VPS. docker compose up.
Every Discord alternative that died tried to out-Discord Discord - custom protocols, custom servers, years catching up to feature parity. They failed because they were not decoupled, scaled poorly on cost, and were horrible to maintain.
Orbit survives by not owning what it does not have to. The IRC server is stock. The identity provider is stock. Orbit builds only the parts where product value lives: the clients, Satellite (voice and video), and Depot (file storage). The rest is adopted, battle-tested, and someone else's maintenance burden.
- Uplink - any stock IRCv3 server (Ergo is the reference). Text, history, presence, signaling. No fork, no patches.
- Satellite - real-time voice, video, and screen sharing. Embeds LiveKit, owns the session model, supports 1:1 P2P calls that work without any server infrastructure at all.
- Depot - thin storage gateway over S3-compatible backends or local disk. Handles auth, quotas, and policy so a raw bucket doesn't have to.
- Transponder - any OIDC provider (Keycloak, Authentik, Supabase). One login, verified everywhere.
- Clients - desktop (Tauri), web app, embeddable widget. Where the UX lives.
Entry is frictionless. Anonymous guest access, no-account voice calls, browser-first on any device. A friend joins a call from a link without signing up for anything. The product demonstrates itself.
Orbit is not a Discord clone. Discord isolates communities into walled-off servers. Orbit works the way IRC always has: channels are lightweight, communities are porous, users belong to many at once. Permissions use IRC channel modes and the bot ecosystem that has existed for decades.
Orbit is not a product to sell. It is infrastructure and a cultural push - resistance to surveillance and platform lock-in. If Orbit ever provides hosted instances, that is a convenience service, not a SaaS play.
The spec/ directory contains the full design spec:
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Architecture | System overview, design philosophy, component glossary, platform comparison |
| Components | Uplink (incl. tag namespace and trust model), Satellite, Depot, Transponder |
| Identity and Auth | Authentication, permissions |
| Clients | Desktop, web app, widget |
| Infrastructure | DNS discovery, deployment, monorepo |
| Next | Mobile, bot API, push delivery, E2E encryption, server discovery, Satellite gateway |
| Decisions | ADRs, open questions, out-of-scope |
| Research | MoQ/Iroh, Leptos/WASM, Linux overlay, Vulkan overlay |
Start with the Platform Comparison if your first question is "how does this compare to Discord." Then read the Design Philosophy for the reasoning behind every major decision.
Living documents. Designs change based on prototyping, community feedback, and what ships in stock Ergo and the IRCv3 ecosystem.