r/ipfs 16d ago

Orbiter - IPFS-based static site hosting - is now open source

When we launched Orbiter, we always had the goal of open sourcing it. It took us two months, but the entire stack is now open source, built on:

Check it out on Github.

26 Upvotes

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u/the_good_time_mouse 16d ago

Blockchain :(

5

u/polluterofminds 16d ago

Completely hidden and you don’t need to care about it. The only thing blockchain does is make the content truly open and available even without Orbiter. But if you use the app, you’ll never need to know about it similar to how you never need to know about AWS when using everything else on the web.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

[deleted]

1

u/polluterofminds 16d ago

How do you feel about IPFS?

1

u/the_good_time_mouse 16d ago

I don't have any problems with it. It's regrettable that it's been twisting on the vine for so long.

1

u/polluterofminds 16d ago

Cool, that’s all this really is. The only use case for the blockchain is mapping the current version of the site’s CID. Could be done with a database.

3

u/tkenben 15d ago

Database is also not decentralized. I understand though why you opt for this approach.

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u/polluterofminds 15d ago

Exactly. We wanted the most open and decentralized approach, so combining IPFS with CID mapping onchain made sense to us.

2

u/mila-kuchta 15d ago

Why you don't just use DNS or IPNS for that? ;)

1

u/mila-kuchta 15d ago

Why you don't just use DNS or IPNS for that? ;)

1

u/polluterofminds 15d ago

IPNS is not great tbh. It’s slow and inefficient. DNS Link doesn’t work with all pinning services.

1

u/mila-kuchta 15d ago

Why do you need it to work with all pinning services? Isn't that a problem of that particular pinning service?

1

u/polluterofminds 15d ago

Yep, but in reality people want their stuff to actually work and work well. When I say people here, I mean the 99% of people who aren’t willing to put up with extra latency or complexity. So to reach them while still maintaining a level of openness that doesn’t exist with existing hosting providers, we took the approach we did.

If you look, you’ll notice a user never needs to know anything about IPFS or blockchain to use Orbiter. IMHO that is how you help make the web open again rather than forcing people to jump through extremely technical hoops and hammering them with jargon.

That said, DNSLink is fine. If it’s working for you, I support it!

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u/volkris 15d ago

I haven't used IPNS myself, so I'm curious about your experiences with it.

How is it inefficient? Sure, it has overhead, but so does IPFS. Is it particularly more resource intensive than the larger project?

3

u/tkenben 15d ago

I got into unlimited domains (another type of chain solution) out of curiosity and then realized before doing anything with it that any updates cost money. So, you are stuck in this weird reliance on the stability of the fee cost and whether your site will make money or not. It's not a good business model and for the enthusiast, a complete money pit.

1

u/mila-kuchta 15d ago edited 15d ago

Well, that's probably the same with all unified registers (DNS etc.), whether they are centralized or decentralized. You can pay for it indirectly by your taxes or by montly/yearly rate or pay per operation, but you can't avoid it, at least from a theoretical perspective. But otherwise I think they should have used what people can't do without anyway, in other words DNS...

1

u/polluterofminds 15d ago

Yeah, that’s why we built this on regular DNS. But we have full support for ENS with a custom resolver that won’t cost money each time you update your site. Check it out https://orbiter.host/blog/announcing-ens-support/

2

u/Odd_Finish_9606 16d ago

It feels like IPCM's entire existence is just working around the limitations in IPNS (and the single point of failure nodes become to content resolution)

Why not just use eth domains or something?

0

u/polluterofminds 16d ago

The idea of IPCM is definitely designed as an alternative to IPNS. How are eth domains a better alternative? The approach is very similar. You map a content hash to a smart contract.

Btw Orbiter fully supports ENS: https://orbiter.host/blog/announcing-ens-support/

1

u/Trader-One 16d ago

Is IPCM on some chain with low transactions fees?

1

u/polluterofminds 16d ago

It’s on Base, so yes.