HN user
Still working on Orbiter[0], and open source web hosting solution focused on keeping things simple and helping developers avoid vendor lock-in.
We recently added serverless functions for backend support, specifically for the bhvr[1] stack though they work with just about anything.
[0] https://orbiter.host [1] https://bhvr.dev
Still working on Orbiter[1] but with some big changes.
Orbiter started as static website and web app hosting, but we recently added what we call server functions (what you call serverless functions). So now you can build full stack apps. Our preferred development stack to support is the new bhvr[2] stack.
I’m working on Orbiter, simple static web hosting that allows anyone to upload a directory of files, use a CLI tool, or use a GitHub action to host their sites and apps in seconds.
My co-worker and I started this as a side project because we were building so many sample apps, proofs of concept, and engineering as marketing apps and we were feeling more and more locked into Vercel every day. So we wanted to go back to client and server separation and when we did that, we realized most hosting providers have moved toward server-side rendering as the default.
Client-side rendering isn’t for everyone, but plenty of people still make simple websites or even complex CSR web apps and don’t want to deal with fully integrated solutions like Vercel (and Netlify now to a lesser extent). Plus they want the flexibility of choosing different tools for their frontend and backend.
This remains a fully bootstrapped side project for us, but it’s gotten the most traction of any side project either of us has worked on.
Working on static website hosting. Thinking about how I can build backend functionality for customers as well while maintaining the openness that the static hosting has offered.
I’ve thought about this a lot before in my personal and professional life. If you combine JSON with a SQLite database, you can get the best of both worlds.
Disclaimer, I wrote this for work but it is based on ideas I developed outside of work. https://pinata.cloud/blog/will-json-work-as-a-database/
Thank you! And thanks for the support!
Every site is hosted on IPFS. This creates a built-in version system and prevents vendor lock-out. Because we want this to be as open as possible (like the web should be), anyone can see a mapping of the history of the sites. We wrote more about it here: https://orbiter.host/blog/how-we-use-blockchain-behind-the-s...
Hey HN!
My co-founder and I launched Orbiter in January to solve an issue we were having with all the mini sites and apps we were launching for our day job. We had gotten frustrated with complicated deployment pipelines and wanted to return to launching simple static sites and launching them quickly.
So, we built Orbiter. We focused initially on making uploads of your static build folder simple and fast. We then layered in a CLI, an API, and a Github action. So Orbiter can fit into just about any workflow.
From the beginning, we wanted it to be open source, and after about 2 months of work, we have just open sourced the entire stack[1].
I hope you'll give it a try and please drop any feedback here.
I made Orbiter. I did not make orbz.fun. That was done independently and I didn’t learn about it until the customer shared it.
I’m building an open source static website hosting platform. The idea was to get back to less complexity. There are so many static sites and apps out there that jump through crazy deployment hoops just for something that should just be a simple file upload.
Recently open sourced everything.
Someone built this which is similar but it grabs websites from blockchain pointers. https://orbz.fun
We had to call our DNS provider who told us there was nothing they could do because it was blocked by the tld owner which was an Italian company. So we called anyone and everyone we could and tried to communicate in broken Italian until they finally agreed to lift the block. It was the worst day we ever had as a company.
Definitely considering LLMs. At the day job, we had a team fine tune a model built to detect phishing content and it worked surprisingly well.
Oh man, this is smart! I’ll have to try this.
Interesting, this seems to be designed for end user protection but if I’m understanding it correctly it could be used by us for proactive detection.
Especially for phishing content, the requirement isn’t so much a legal one (though that’s important to watch for) as it is a practical one. People flagging phishing content on your domain can get your domain wiped from the internet. Trust me, we had a terrifying 8 hours at my day job a couple of years ago because of this.
We’ve removed the file size limits! Thanks for the feedback!
One of the co-creators here! The file size limits are actually old and we need to update them.
Though on the 1GB total storage I have a question: with a maximum of 2 sites on the free plan, what scenarios do you see your sites being larger than 1GB? I’m genuinely curious if we’re overlooking something.
Hey HN, the other day I had the urge to build something retro. I almost built an old Windows file system in the browser, but decided to go with Macintosh because somehow it felt MORE nostalgic to me.
The app is built with only two dependencies: Clerk for authentication (but there's a guest mode specifically for the HN crowd to play around with) and Pinata for file storage and retrieval. I kind of thought I could speed run this in a day, and I was mostly right. I ended up getting the first version done in 2 days. I've polished it up a bit, and now it's ready to play with.
Would love to hear any feedback!
Edit - this is designed for desktop only because the old Macintosh operating systems were not mobile.
Local first doesn’t mean local only. There are times where your device will need to sync data from a remote location/other peers. That data may be encrypted. This project is trying to solve for local access control in such situations.
There’s a really good podcast that focuses on what happened to the way reading has been taught over the last 30-40 years. https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/
I talk about “thinking in public” from a leadership and knowledge sharing perspective within an organization, so this might not be the same angle the OP is considering or asking about. But in a heavily remote world, messaging apps hold the vast majority of our knowledge. It may not be the best model, but it is the dominant one. If the info is there, these apps become powerful knowledge databases for those who know how to use them. If the info is there, company direction and strategy can more easily be understood by a wider audience than just the upper level executives and managers.
I give some specific examples in this blog post I wrote late last year: https://www.polluterofminds.com/thinking-in-public/
Supabase if you was a managed solution. Great free tier IMO.
Disclaimer, I am head of product for Pinata
I think of IPFS as being an open data platform first. You can connect to it and disconnect as frequently as you like. The underlying p2p capabilities don't have to necessarily be fast. It just has to do the job it was designed to do—get content in a permissionless fashion.
Speed, convenience, reliability, and more are not the problems protocol need to solve for. Providers can solve for these problems without infringing on your ability to "take your ball and go home." Take Pinata for example. We provide dedicated IPFS gateways that provide essentially the same experience you would expect from traditional cloud providers. But if you ever want to leave Pinata or back your data up or just inspect your data, you don't need Pinata's permission. IPFS media is public and open. Convenience is a layer on top of that.
IPFS also doesn't need or have tokens. Filecoin is a separate entity. IPFS is especially powerful because it is not linked to a specific blockchain or currency.
Hey HN community! I’m excited to showcase an app I helped build during the ETHDenver Hackathon last week. It’s called submarine.me and it lets anyone—technical or not—upload private, IPFS-backed content that they can lock behind an NFT with a simple share link. Anyone with the link can prove they own the NFT in question and unlock the media.
Full disclosure, this app was built under the Pinata (https://pinata.cloud) banner, but being able to bring it to life during a hackathon was an incredible experience. The idea stemmed from the original release of a feature Pinata calls Submarine. We rolled this feature out last year, and it let people upload media to private storage nodes, generate IPFS content identifiers for verifiability, and share that content with a selective audience. The problem was that individuals and communities wanted to have more complex mechanisms and automation for sharing the media. They didn’t want to have to manually generate a link to the content.
For developers, this was no problem. They could write code and implement their own solutions to programmatically generate access tokens for the locked content based on the criteria they set. For non-technical creators, this was a non-starter. We believe submarine.me solves that.
Creators simply have to choose how they’d like their media to be unlocked (currently submarine.me only supports NFT unlocking, but more mechanisms will be rolling out soon), provide preview data about the locked media, then upload the media that should be private. When they do so, a simple link is generated. These creators can then safely share that link on Twitter, Discord, Telegram, or anywhere else they want, knowing that unauthorized people will not be able to unlock the content.
For those that are trying to retrieve the media, the experience is dead simple. Go to the link, sign a message verifying control of the Ethereum wallet that holds the NFT, and if they do, in fact, have the NFT in their wallet, the private media is returned. If they don’t have the NFT, they are blocked.
Here is a demo video of submarine.me in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhT4Xqn1tYI
I know the Hacker News community prefers to be able to experiment with apps on Show HN without having to sign in or subscribe, but this app is directly linked to existing Pinata accounts. So to use it, you will have to have a Pinata Professional Plan account.
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts!
This is awesome! Your dashboard is awesome too. I’ve been wanting to track time spent on my side projects, but I’ve never implemented anything. You have a chart for your time spent! So I’m wondering what you use to track that with?
This is great! Where are the archives stored? Locally on the streamer’s machine or on a remote server?