ODC Explorer: a web directory you browse locally over IPFS. No search engine, no gateways, no trackers.
Search engines see every query you type, rank results for their own reasons, and know who asked. I've been building ODC Explorer as an alternative: a desktop client for the Open Domain Catalog, a directory of websites organised like a library and read straight from IPFS.
What it is
The Open Domain Catalog files websites under call numbers, like books on shelves: 1 Reference › 15 Search Engines, 3 Entertainment › 30 Gaming › 300 Web, and so on. You browse the shelves instead of typing queries. The whole catalog is stored as content-addressed blocks on IPFS and published under a single signed IPNS name.
ODC Explorer runs on your own machine. It's a small local web app with its own embedded IPFS peer, written in pure Python.
What it does for your privacy
- No queries to log. There's no search box sending what you're looking for to anyone. You browse a catalog, and the browsing happens on your machine.
- No middleman server. It talks to the IPFS network directly. There's no HTTP gateway, no API backend and no account.
- No third-party requests from the page. No CDNs, no web fonts, no analytics, no cookies. Every page is sent with
Content-Security-Policy: default-src 'self', so the browser can't load anything from elsewhere even by mistake. - No referrers. Links to listed sites open only when you click them, in a new tab, with no referrer.
- Local by default. The web interface listens on
127.0.0.1only. - Settings stay in your browser. Your theme, the 18+ switch (adult content is hidden by default) and whether you've seen the donation prompt live in localStorage, never on a server.
- Tamper-evident content. Every block is checked against its content hash and against the catalog spec, and the catalog root is signed. Nobody in the middle can quietly change what you see.
What it does NOT protect you from (please read)
I'd rather be upfront about this than have you find out later:
- IPFS is a peer-to-peer network, not an anonymity network. Peers you fetch from can see your IP address and which blocks you request, and blocks map to catalog categories.
- Your node shares what it reads, publicly. To keep the catalog online, every reader serves the blocks it has fetched and announces them on the IPFS DHT. That means your IP is publicly listed as a provider of the blocks you've read, which can reveal that you use ODC and roughly which shelves you've browsed.
- DNS. To join the network it looks up the standard IPFS bootstrap hostnames through your system resolver, and falls back to public resolvers (1.1.1.1 and 8.8.8.8) if yours fails.
- Router port mapping. It asks your router (UPnP/NAT-PMP) to open a port so other readers can reach you.
If your threat model includes your ISP or network observers knowing you use it, this isn't the tool for that, at least not yet.
Try it
Linux, Python 3.9+, Flask:
git clone https://github.com/ki4jgt/ODC-Explorer.git
cd ODC-Explorer
./install.sh
Or run it from source with ./run.sh --open.
It's early. The catalog is young and the spec is a draft (v0.1), and I've only tested on Linux. but I'm spending most of my nights adding, shifting, updating and ranking sites captured by my web crawler (respects robots.txt and sends a hit to each domain name only once every 30 seconds).
There are adult categories
I'd especially like to hear from privacy folks: which of the caveats above matter most to you?
At the moment, I'm using a web crawler. I'm going to create a website soon to receive dead link reports.
They're ordered based on a mix of author expertise and cultural relevance.
In that case, how are undesirable sites being identified and weeded out (e.g. scams, propaganda, misinformation, etc.) - is that just based on your (or your team's) opinions and (hopefully) research? If so, how does this not just become a reflection of your views and opinions, rather than an objective list?
How does Google?
I don't claim to eliminate bias. My product's use is that it's open to critique. The rankings are open to public scrutiny.
The word propaganda comes from propagate. All information is propaganda in some form or another.
will others be able to set up their own libraries with their own catalogs (based on the same odc spec)? this will be one of the better defenses against having a single viewpoint reflected.
i completely disagree with that reading of "propaganda". it has a specific definition relating to deliberate attempts to influence people. that is not the same as info having a bias or tending to support a given conclusion or perspective. people making libraries are making curatorial decisions about what goes in them and how items are presented.
you're probably more interested in the tech side than the curatorial side of this, but both are equally important. Success is measured by the outcomes your system will produce.
I'm working in the ability of catalogs to link to one another, so that I can have people who specialize in a given field take over certain subchains.
The original meaning of propaganda was to propagate the Christian religion. There was no malice intended.
Actually, I love the curator side most.
Yeah, if it was possible for anyone to create and maintain a library, and the user could 'subscribe' to the libraries they wanted to use, that would make it a more useful project, IMO. The concept is interesting, but this is a whole separate, independent browser, not a Mastodon feed. I wouldn't want to commit to being beholden to one person's idea of what should and shouldn't be included, and I think you'd have a difficult time finding too many people who did.
It's a server, not a browser.
Sorry, maybe poorly worded. "Browsing experience" maybe. It's a separate app you install, not just a directory you visit on the web, was what I was getting at, so there's a lot bigger of a barrier to adoption than something like subscribing to someone's Mastodon feed and getting their recommendations.
It's P2P. Takedown resistant.