[HN Gopher] Show HN: Digital Carrot - Block social media with pr...
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Show HN: Digital Carrot - Block social media with programmable
rules and goals
Hi Everyone, Digital Carrot is a programmable and pluggable app
blocker. It lets you block websites and apps on iOS, Mac and
Windows until a set of conditions or goal is met. For example you
can block Reddit, Instagram and Steam until your Apple Watch
reports that you have walked 5000 steps. The app works by
collecting data via plugins that you can use to create goals for
yourself. Goals are all represented by expressions that return true
or false based on the data you provide. For example, if you want to
create a goal to finish all of the tasks in your to-do list you
could do something like `data.apple_reminders.due == 0`. The
blocking system is also pluggable. That means you can block items
via DNS with services as Pi-hole[3]. It also means that the app is
not just limited to website blocking! In fact you could write a
plugin to control anything that is available via a REST, such as
locking a smart lock on your snack cupboard or cranking up the AC
in your office until you go outside. Keeping security and user
privacy is a top priority for this app (given that it's literally
designed to collect information about you). Because of that: - We
do not collect or share any information that the app gathers. - Our
sync feature is fully end to end encrypted using AES256 and the
secure remote password protocol. - All plugins are sandboxed. They
cannot access data provided by other plugins and have no external
access unless granted by the user. - The app is transparent about
the data it has. All of the data that is available to use for goals
is browsable in app. Like many of you, I've been dismayed by big
tech's lack of concern for our privacy, so keeping these guarantees
is personally very important to me. One of the fun things about
this project has been that I can kind of flip the script by taking
all of the information that has been gathered about me and use it
to help cut down on the distractions in my life :) Anyway, I had
to walk 4km to unblock HN in order to post this, so I hope you find
it helpful! [1] Technical overview:
https://www.digitalcarrot.app/docs/overview/ [2] Plugin
repository: https://github.com/digital-carrot-app/plugins [3] Pi-
hole plugin: https://github.com/digital-carrot-
app/plugins/tree/main/piho...
Author : newswangerd
Score : 27 points
Date : 2026-01-14 15:11 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.digitalcarrot.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.digitalcarrot.app)
| newswangerd wrote:
| 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).
| mrbluecoat wrote:
| > 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?
| newswangerd wrote:
| 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.
| cadamsdotcom wrote:
| It'd be neat to have a proxy that can just block the feeds, or
| block content from anyone with more than 5000 followers.
| newswangerd wrote:
| 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.
| newswangerd wrote:
| 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
| Johnny_Bonk wrote:
| Hahah love the idea of turning off lights etc lol
| eightysixfour wrote:
| 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.
| newswangerd wrote:
| How do home assistant sensors work? I've thought about adding
| a webhook capability. Would it be something like that?
| eightysixfour wrote:
| There's a push and a poll model for home assistant sensors:
| https://developers.home-
| assistant.io/docs/integration_fetchi...
|
| Probably easy for us techy folks to just setup a webhook as
| well.
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(page generated 2026-01-14 23:00 UTC)