Show HN: Digital Carrot – Block social media with programmable rules and goals(www.digitalcarrot.app)
39 pointsby newswangerd24 days ago4 comments
  • newswangerd24 days ago
    I would LOVE to be able to open source this project at some point, but I also want to be able to make a living off of maintaining it. I've been reading up on some source available licenses such as Polyform, which can contain clauses that trigger the code to go open source at some point. If I get some traction, I'd really like to make a similar commitment where we will open source this in X months/years. Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Is this a good idea?

    I'm a former Red Hatter, so I'm all too familiar with the revenue hits a product can take when they go open source, but I have no ambition to turn this into a big business, so I think that should be acceptable (unless revenue dips to zero).

  • newswangerd24 days ago
    I would also love to hear what kinds of plugins the HN Community would like to see. At the moment I'm thinking about the following:

    - Github: this would allow you to set goals based on reviewing PRs, closing tickets, reading GH notifications etc.

    - Homelab/Zapier/IFTTT: this would allow some kind of funny things like turning off lights or locking locks if you don't complete your goals. I don't have any smarthome stuff, so this would be hard for me to personally build.

    - Notion/Obsidian/Jira/Trello

    - Google/Apple Calendar: this could help people focus on meetings instead of (for example) scrolling HN

    • eightysixfour24 days ago
      I wonder if you could set it as a sensor for Home Assistant, then we could build our own smart home automations outside of the app instead of you needing to do anything.
    • Johnny_Bonk24 days ago
      Hahah love the idea of turning off lights etc lol
  • mrbluecoat24 days ago
    > Create a 15 minute timed goal that you have to start as soon as you wake up.

    Could this be automated to trigger on first device unlock after midnight?

    • newswangerd24 days ago
      At the moment pretty much everything automatically resets at midnight, including any timers. It's not an issue for me since I rarely stay up past midnight, but I did notice one problem where my step goal reset on New Years eve and I wasn't able to watch my sleep videos on youtube because of it, so I'd like to find a way to make this more configurable.
  • cadamsdotcom24 days ago
    It’d be neat to have a proxy that can just block the feeds, or block content from anyone with more than 5000 followers.
    • newswangerd24 days ago
      I'm working on something like this for Android. My goal is to build a system where plugins can selectively block parts of apps based on a set of rules. I can't promise that this will end up making it into the final version because the Android documentation states that the accessibility APIs may only be used for accessibility tools, but it's what all of the other app blockers on android do so fingers crossed they let me do it as well.

      This would also be possible for desktop, since I'm using browser plugins to block websites on Desktop at the moment. I don't think that this is possible on iOS, but there may be APIs that could enable something like it that I'm not aware of. As much as I like Apple's commitment to privacy, the way that they've locked down a lot of their APIs has been a real thorn in my side for enabling some of these more advanced use cases.