{"collection":"posts","slug":"1736537615834-orbz-dot-com","cid":"bafkreiho7443cu7e7uycpj3ojlykl3uumrim25pxkphimxabau2mdqtghq","title":"orbz dot com","excerpt":"orbz.fun reads Orbiter's onchain site registry and turns it into a StumbleUpon-style discovery tool.","body":"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.\n\nThat version of the web still exists, but finding it now means pushing past social feeds and knowing where to look.\n\nWhen [orbiter.host](https://orbiter.host/) launched a little over a week ago, one thing jumped out at me off the page:\n\n\u003e Launching a website shouldn't be hard\n\nThat line is close to the idea behind my [Pure Internet](https://iammatthias.com/posts/1731955749292-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.\n\n[Orbiter](https://orbiter.host/) hosts static sites on IPFS and uses Base, an Ethereum L2, to track which version is current.\n\nAn 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.\n\nOrbiter 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.\n\nThat 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.\n\n[orbz.fun](https://orbz.fun) turns that list into a StumbleUpon-style browser for Orbiter sites.\n\nThe OrbiterFactory contract at `0x486Edc2E94926fd50398e2129089648b8B9E3D3A` emits an event whenever someone deploys a site. That event contains the address of the new OrbiterSite contract.\n\nThe 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.\n\n![](blob://bafkreictk52ade5fghsul5cucke3qwkswbho7pt5qnam2xxblzd5sfbofe)\n\n\nThe 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.\n\nThe 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.","tags":["web-development","decentralization","blockchain","ipfs","web3","pure-internet","tech-history"],"published":true,"createdAt":"2025-01-10T11:33:00Z","updatedAt":"2026-07-16T14:56:30Z"}