orbit-db

Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

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3Distinct people

3Mentions

0Explicit recommenders

7GitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

Peer-to-Peer Databases for the Decentralized Web

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

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Also in these discussions

orbitdb-archive/orbit · linked in 3 of the same discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 1:49:46 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by week3 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-06-08 17:37:35 UTC to 2016-10-17 05:18:11 UTC. Weeks start Monday, UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Comments
Jun 6	2016-06-06 00:00:00 UTC	2016-06-13 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jun 13	2016-06-13 00:00:00 UTC	2016-06-20 00:00:00 UTC	1	1
Jun 20	2016-06-20 00:00:00 UTC	2016-06-27 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jun 27	2016-06-27 00:00:00 UTC	2016-07-04 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 4	2016-07-04 00:00:00 UTC	2016-07-11 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 11	2016-07-11 00:00:00 UTC	2016-07-18 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 18	2016-07-18 00:00:00 UTC	2016-07-25 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Jul 25	2016-07-25 00:00:00 UTC	2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 1	2016-08-01 00:00:00 UTC	2016-08-08 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 8	2016-08-08 00:00:00 UTC	2016-08-15 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 15	2016-08-15 00:00:00 UTC	2016-08-22 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 22	2016-08-22 00:00:00 UTC	2016-08-29 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Aug 29	2016-08-29 00:00:00 UTC	2016-09-05 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 5	2016-09-05 00:00:00 UTC	2016-09-12 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 12	2016-09-12 00:00:00 UTC	2016-09-19 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 19	2016-09-19 00:00:00 UTC	2016-09-26 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Sep 26	2016-09-26 00:00:00 UTC	2016-10-03 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Oct 3	2016-10-03 00:00:00 UTC	2016-10-10 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Oct 10	2016-10-10 00:00:00 UTC	2016-10-17 00:00:00 UTC	0	0
Oct 17	2016-10-17 00:00:00 UTC	2016-10-24 00:00:00 UTC	1	1

What Hacker News says

3 sources

haadcode·Oct 17, 2016

Developer of Orbit here. Great to hear all the feedback, thank you! Most questions have been already answered, but to clarify: Orbit indeed uses IPFS pubsub (https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/pull/3202) for real-time message propagation, no servers are involved. In addition, it uses orbit-db (https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db) - a distributed database on IPFS - for the message history, so the messages are not ephemeral and the channel history can always be retrieved. This is a really nice property and allows Orbit to work in "disconnected" or split networks, as well as offline. Orbit has been a testbed for IPFS applications and orbit-db came out of that work, enabling various types of distributed, p2p applications and use cases: comment systems, votes/likes/starring systems (with counters), feeds, etc. And now with IPFS pubsub, we're fin

Read the rest

ally at a point of being completely serverless and distributed which is hugely exciting and opens so many doors for future work! I recently gave a talk at Devcon2 about Orbit and developing distributed real-time applications (https://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon/?session=orbit-distrib...) and while the videos of the talk are not out yet (afaik coming very soon!), there's the uncut video of the talk here http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XMTc1NjU1NzEyNA==.html?firsttim... if you're interested to learn more. Video of the demo I showed in the talk is here https://ethereumfoundation.org/devcon/wp-content/uploads/201.... I'll be hanging out on #ipfs in Orbit if you're interested to try it out. Note that the Electron app and the web version at orbit.libp2p.io don't talk to each other atm (we're working on this), so I would highly recommend to try out the Electron app. While you're at it, try drag & dropping files and folders to a channel, that's one of the coolest feature of Orbit atm imo :) We're actively developing Orbit and making a push in the next few months, if you're interested to take part in the design and development, or would like to develop your own apps using the same tech, join us on Github https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/issues. Thanks for the comments everyone, much appreciated!

In Orbit – Distributed, serverless, peer-to-peer chat application on IPFS

carolc·Jun 15, 2016

(IPFS dev here) We've been working hard to get js-ipfs to a working level and just last week announced it's ready. While it's still early days and we have plenty to do to make it even more robust, we have it fully working with WebRTC support as of today. We've developed some apps and demos that essentially enable you to create dynamic content and apps on IPFS, purely in the browser. We do have to currently rely on a centralized Pubsub (in a similar fashion to torrent trackers) but we're working on to provide a decentralized pubsub mechanisms as part of IPFS. Regarding persistency: js-ipfs and the main ipfs (native go-ipfs) networks are not yet connected but we're very close to having that. Once they all communicate in the same network, we can provide a lot better persistency as users don't have to keep the tabs open in the browser. Take a

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look at some of the examples of what can be done today with js-ipfs, that is fully in the browser: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit (specifically https://github.com/haadcode/orbit/tree/js-ipfs) https://github.com/ipfs/paperhub https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db https://github.com/haadcode/proto2

In Serverless Sync in Web Apps Using Bit Torrent

mbrock·Jun 8, 2016

Git is pretty good at handling change, and it does it by building on a static object store plus a very thin layer of mutable names. I think IPFS is already sufficient for that, and indeed someone has already built a chat application. https://github.com/haadcode/orbit The underlying IPFS event database implementation: https://github.com/haadcode/orbit-db I think that there's something related to subscribing to changes without any central point of failure that's not currently possible with the IPFS implementations, but I also think that this is planned.

In The Web’s Creator Looks to Reinvent It