The Black Orbit is an open-source, user-sourced archive and search engine rooted in care, sovereignty, and collective memory.
It began as a thought seedling in 2017—born from the desire for a space beyond mainstream social media, a place to search Black visuality, knowledge, and connection without algorithmic distortion or extraction. In 2024, The Black Orbit began taking material form as a solo database project, built through aspiration, persistence, and a commitment to imagining new ways of searching, researching, and browsing the web.
The Black Orbit draws inspiration from the early, “gooey” internet—experimental, communal, imperfect—and fuses it with a philosophy of technological independence. It resists speed, surveillance, and flattening, instead prioritizing intention, context, and relational discovery.
At its core, The Black Orbit is a curated and living catalog of resources: people, practices, businesses, institutions, and mutual aid efforts that support and sustain Black, Indigenous, people of color, LGBTQIA+, disabled, and working-class communities. These resources are not simply listed, but held—organized in ways that honor cultural specificity, lived experience, and economic, social, mental, and spiritual care.
The Black Orbit is not a platform chasing scale. It is an infrastructure for the margins—designed for navigation rather than consumption, preservation rather than virality, and collective use rather than ownership.
The Black Orbit is built without generative AI as a foundational design choice. This refusal protects human authorship, cultural context, and lived experience—especially in communities whose labor, images, and language have historically been extracted without consent. Knowledge within The Black Orbit is gathered, described, and organized by people, not machines trained on uncredited or exploitative datasets.
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This is an intentional refusal of automated knowledge production that exploits uncredited labor and flattens cultural context. All information is gathered, described, and organized by people—with care, accountability, and consent.
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This is a commitment to presence, accountability, and care in how information is held.
Accessibility is not a finished checkbox but a continued effort. The Black Orbit is committed to visual clarity, readability, and navigation that supports multiple ways of seeing, moving, processing, and engaging with information.
Design decisions prioritize:
Accessibility evolves alongside the community it serves and remains open to revision, feedback, and growth.
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Knowledge Is Living
Information within The Black Orbit is not extracted or flattened. Resources are held with respect for origin, context, and relationship. Knowledge here is understood as living, relational, and rooted in care.
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The Black Orbit does not track, profile, or harvest user data. Searching the database is not a transaction—it is an act of exploration without surveillance.