Stories, guides and ideas
News, guides and notes from the Orbit team.
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We Made Orbit Do Too Much
Some of Orbit's performance problems are consequences of decisions we made. We let convenient shortcuts accumulate, gave ordinary actions too much work, and now have to clean up after ourselves. This is how that happens, what it costs, and why we have not earned a victory lap.
Trust is not a score: building safer and fairer online communities
Why healthy communities need reporting, human review, proportionate enforcement, meaningful appeals, recovery, and communication people can actually understand.
Forms are conversations, not database rows
What changed when we redesigned Orbit Forms around respondents, reviewers, and the awkward space between them.
Caching Discord without lying to ourselves
Why Orbit caches channels and guilds aggressively, but treats permission-sensitive member roles very differently.
How Orbit happened: a short history of questionable decisions
The mildly irresponsible origin story of a Discord bot that kept becoming a platform whenever nobody was looking.