orbz dot com
2 min read
I used to browse StumbleUpon for hours. There was always something new, one click away, and no feed trying to learn what would keep me there.
That version of the web still exists, but finding it now means pushing past social feeds and knowing where to look.
When orbiter.host launched a little over a week ago, one thing jumped out at me off the page:
Launching a website shouldn't be hard
That line is close to the idea behind my Pure Internet experiments. Launching a website should be easy enough that the strange little idea survives the setup. Straight HTML and CSS are often plenty.
Orbiter hosts static sites on IPFS and uses Base, an Ethereum L2, to track which version is current.
An uploaded site receives a Content Identifier (CID), a cryptographic hash of its content. The CID is immutable, which makes it useful for delivery and caching but awkward for a website that changes.
Orbiter handles that through an IPCM (InterPlanetary CID Mapping) contract for each site. The contract points at the current CID while its event history retains the earlier ones. The site owner controls updates, and the version trail stays public.
That history gives every site a small Wayback Machine, and the factory contract provides something else I wanted: a public list of every site deployed through Orbiter.
orbz.fun turns that list into a StumbleUpon-style browser for Orbiter sites.
The OrbiterFactory contract at 0x486Edc2E94926fd50398e2129089648b8B9E3D3A emits an event whenever someone deploys a site. That event contains the address of the new OrbiterSite contract.
The browser reads these events to build a complete list of every site deployed on the platform, storing it in IndexedDB along with each site's CID mapping. When you hit "Start Exploring", it picks a random mapping, and loads the content in an iframe.
The client is React, Vite, TypeScript, and CSS Modules. IndexedDB keeps it from replaying the entire contract history on every visit. Site owners can opt out by sending me their contract address on Farcaster.
The project is small. The useful part is that Orbiter's permissionless deployment history doubles as a public directory, so nobody had to build or maintain a separate catalog before the wandering could start.