Hi all, been a while since I posted the degoog beta, been head down working on all my apps.

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cronmaster on top of degoog, hi friends!

• You can find the core repo here: https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog
• The official extensions repo here: https://github.com/degoog-org/official-extensions
• And a little showcase of community made extensions: https://degoog-org.github.io/community-extensions/

Degoog is a search aggregator meant to be plug and play, the app itself is extremely light (about 50mb to 70mb ram usage whilst idle, biggest spike I've seen recently has been about 100mb in usage), and then there's a very comprehensive extension system where you can create engines, plugins and transports (transports are the way I've named systems to fetch data, headless browsers, curl alternatives and so on).

The app has been in beta for a while and today I've released the first stable beta, so I'd love to re-announce it here and get at bit more feedback. Next post I'll make will be once it's out of beta and fully stable, trying to not spam this too much.

Little quick history for anyone who hasn't seen the first post, this was born from my PERSONAL gripes with searxng (no shades, the internet is beautiful because it's vary), can't say my project is better, it's too new to say that, but it works more for my personal preferences and hopefully it resonates with some of you too.

Let's talk about AI usage like adults please

This is NOT vibecoded, it's not AI driven and it's NOT some slop put together in 5 minutes. Some people here know me, they know I maintain my projects, I code myself and I have been a software engineer for many many years.

I actually have rejected pull requests that were very obviously vibecoded (p.s. fucking hilarious if you check the CLAUDE.md file in the repo, the PRs were riddled with these comments I force in there).

That said I obviously make some use of AI, it's 2026, dunno what you all expect, open source however is my way to escaping how my day job REQUIRES me to use AI, so it's only used for stuff I can't be bothered to do (e.g. repetitive boring tasks, documentations, tests and heavy debugging). If you have issues with this please go tell a carpenter to use a manual screwdriver and not a power drill and see if they say yes or throw it at you, thank you <3

First of all hi all! I am a software engineer and in my free time I develop self-hostable alternative to big tech products (see Jotty and Cr*nmaster for example), been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there's no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do.. pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server and from /c/selfhosted have been testing it fairly successfully and i've been on top of bug fixing). Last BIG thing to do is coming up with a good name for the official release, I'll create a community poll for it and ask opinions on the repo discussion tabs too.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

Hey,

Some of you may know me for Jotty and Cr*nmaster, been quiet with my head down lately improving my apps and trying to build a searxng alternative for myself.

Whilst I have used searxng for about a year now, I have had quite a few personal gripes with it (mostly stuff I personally would prefer worked differently) so in the past few weeks I have decided to make my take on it and ran it happily locally. Since publishing the beta to my discord server I ended up building a fairly extensive tool.

Degoog is actually pretty minimal, there's no much to it aside from a very comprehensive plugin/extension system. The idea being users can create their own engines, themes and plugins that hook into the core application and do.. pretty much anything, from adding stuff to the result page (e.g. speedtests, tmdb information, ip retrieval, rss feeds embedded on the home page) to full on OIDC systems.

This is still very much in beta and I figured the best way to get it out of beta would be to publish it to a wider audience (currently some users in our discord server have been testing it fairly successfully and i've been on top of bug fixing).

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/degoog

Official extensions: https://github.com/fccview/fccview-degoog-extensions

Docs: https://fccview.github.io/degoog

You can install custom plugins/extensions. You can make your own repo and add it to the store page in the settings, or you can just have your own plugins locally for yourself.

Let me know what you think, and feel free to ask any questions and feel free to join our discord (link in releases page on any of my apps) for a more direct chat about things <3

Photoshop it's pretty damn expensive nowadays so I had to cancel my subscription a year and half ago due to specific circumstances I was in. For as much as I like to lie to myself about it, nothing gets close to how good it is. Photopea is kinda good but 20 layers in and the whole machine starts begging for mercy, gimp plain sucks, tried few open source/selfhostable alternatives and nothing takes the cake.

Anyone know of any valid alternative? I may need to start giving my money back to Adobe after all.

All images were made by myself, from the ground up, using various pixabay/envato elements images, there's a layer by layer video of the first one, some layers are grouped so it feels like an image is being dumped in, I just made it a while back to explain the process to somebody and it's still on my channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQWMuSFkTOQ

There's also similar videos on my instagram page fccview it's not very active, no need for follows, just giving as much info as possible to understand the process ♥️

Hope you like them :)

Kind and understanding friends with shared nerdy interests, I am here to present once more Jotty to yours truly!

• Repo: https://github.com/fccview/jotty
• Demo: https://demo.jotty.page/

The latest release features Tags and it's something I have been planning for months (since it was first requested) due to being way too worried about messing up with the simplicity of the app.

For anyone unaware, Jotty is a note taking/checklist app that keeps notes in your file system, no databases needed, no overhead, no complexity. It has everything you may want from a note taking app, packaged in a very simple and easy to understand UI (in my view also pretty polished, but it's not like I've extensively obsessed over every single detail or anything like that at all lol).

You can find a bunch of info about Jotty in the article I wrote on noted.lol where I go in depth on why I started the project, what kind of advanced features it offers and way WAY too much info about my personal life.

For anyone interested in performance, the app is actually fairly lightweight, I'm not just throwing that word around because AI told me to, I swear! The docker image is about 400mb (most of the weight is due to Alpine, the actual app is little over 100mb in size), couldn't get it to use more than 150mb of ram while active, haven't seen it go over 0% in cpu usage. If you don't believe me you can believe our friends in the proxmox community scripts .

Hope you like it, feel free to ask any questions <3

Hi!

2025 was a big year for my open source goals and I wanted to share some accomplishments with you, after all I wouldn't have gotten so far with any of my projects if it wasn't for the few selfhosted/open source communities I interact with daily <3

Thank you for all your support and here's a summary of everything I've built/maintained throughout 2025. Everything is free, self-hostable and entirely open source.

p.s. - no, these are NOT vibe coded.

jotty.page - 1.3k stars - 78.3K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/jotty

Jotty is a lightweight note taking/checklist app with a ton of features packed in a very minimal easy to use UI, it features two types of encryptions, drawio/excalidraw/mermaid diagrams, tons of language syntax highlighting for codeblocks, kanban boards and a lot more.

Cr*nmaster - 903 stars - 103K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/cronmaster

Crnmaster is a UI to manage cronjobs and easily create and schedule scripts, it allows you to log cronjobs (including live logging)*

Scatola Magica (beta) - 108 stars - 2.47K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/scatola-magica

Scatola Magica is a file upload/download system which allows you to upload files in chunk for maximum speed. The cool feature about it is that you can drop a file literally anywhere, from anywhere, including copy/pasting into the page, if you paste text it creates a file with the right file extensions - e.g. if you paste javascript it'll create a .js file) - it also has full web torrent support, but needs to be enabled in the settings page as it's in beta

Here's to a 2026 full of self hosting and coding <3

Hi!

2025 was a big year for my open source goals and I wanted to share some accomplishments with you, after all I wouldn't have gotten so far with any of my projects if it wasn't for the few selfhosted communities I interact with daily <3

Thank you for all your support and here's a summary of everything I've built/maintained throughout 2025. Everything is free, self-hostable and entirely open source.

p.s. - no, these are NOT vibe coded.

jotty.page - 1.3k stars - 78.3K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/jotty

Jotty is a lightweight note taking/checklist app with a ton of features packed in a very minimal easy to use UI, it features two types of encryptions, drawio/excalidraw/mermaid diagrams, tons of language syntax highlighting for codeblocks, kanban boards and a lot more.

Cr*nmaster - 903 stars - 103K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/cronmaster

Crnmaster is a UI to manage cronjobs and easily create and schedule scripts, it allows you to log cronjobs (including live logging)*

Scatola Magica (beta) - 108 stars - 2.47K total downloads

repo: https://github.com/fccview/scatola-magica

Scatola Magica is a file upload/download system which allows you to upload files in chunk for maximum speed. The cool feature about it is that you can drop a file literally anywhere, from anywhere, including copy/pasting into the page, if you paste text it creates a file with the right file extensions - e.g. if you paste javascript it'll create a .js file) - it also has full web torrent support, but needs to be enabled in the settings page as it's in beta

Here's to a 2026 full of self hosting and coding <3

edit

As of version 1.14.3 I have also introduced XChaCha20 encryption (used as default) to allow both symmetric and asymmetric encryption types.

Hi all!

Just wanted to give an update as it's been about two months since the last post I made about Jotty - see it here

We are approaching end of year and I just want to thank this amazing community for the huge support I have received, it has sincerely given me an amazing escape from a lot of shit stuff I had going on in my life (and still, unfortunately, do).

For anyone not knowing about Jotty, the tl;dr is this little snippet here from the readme:

A self-hosted app for your checklists, tasks and notes.

jotty·page is a lightweight alternative for managing your personal checklists and notes.
It's extremely easy to deploy, keeps all your data on your own server with your own file
structure (no databases!) and allows you to encrypt/decrypt your notes for your personal
peace of mind.

Last thing I want is people thinking this post is AI, so I won't give a full on sales pitch, but a bit of context is always needed I suppose lol

You can read about it more on the repo: https://github.com/fccview/jotty
And here's the website with the demo in case you want to play around with it before installing it: https://jotty.page/

Anyhow, PGP encryption has been a much requested feature, for a few months actually, but I didn't want to rush something as delicate as that, so I took my time and I think it's working pretty neatly, passphrase is never stored on the server, private/public key can be generated straight from Jotty or you can import your own/mount them from whatever folder you want on your system on read only.

There's also a ton of new features since the last post two months ago, but this is the one I'm the most excited about.

Let me know what you all think about the feature and Jotty in general and I'll see you in the comments <3

Lately I have been using AI more and more in my codebase and that's been a bit of a hit and miss if you ask me.

I reckon it's an amazing tool that allows developers to truly optimise their workflow, however at times laziness take over and code reviews are not as frequent as they should be.

I really REALLY wanted to build something without using AI after having spent months and months getting a bit too complacent. And this is the first idea that came to mind. Of course to celebrate this occasion I went for a technology I hadn't used in almost a decade: jQuery!!!

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai
You can play around with the tool on fccview.github.io/ackchyually-ai

Few disclaimers:

• I am a full stack javascript developer (with extensive knowledge of php and a very good grasp of shell). This means majority of the detection will be revolving around javascript, if you develop in a different language and you feel like you know AI patterns in that language PLEASE do create a pull request so we can make the detection even more accurate for other type of syntax!
• The tool uses MY OWN metrics, this is doing what I usually do to see if something is (in my opinion) been made with AI and barely reviewed by a human. It's not gospel, it's not a scientific method, it's most definitely going to be flawed, so keep it with a grain of salt, it can always be improved and collaboration/community support will definitely help with it
• I don't hate AI, on contrary I enjoy using it and I find value in not needing to "google it" whenever I hit a blocker, more times than not, AI has a valid solution that can be used, refined and applied properly. What I have mostly an issue with is people randomly generating code, not reviewing it and trying to sell you the moon when they barely understand the architecture of what they built
• Please do not make this post a fight between pro/against AI individuals, that's not the aim of it

All the patterns I am using to identify possible AI code are here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai/tree/main/data if you come up with more patterns/ideas and have more ideas on what to look for please reply here, open an issue and/or make a pull request, but at ONE CONDITION, do NOT use AI for this. It'd go against the core principle of this one pure little app I decided to build <3

Lately I have been using AI more and more in my codebase and that's been a bit of a hit and miss if you ask me.

I reckon it's an amazing tool that allows developers to truly optimise their workflow, however at times laziness take over and code reviews are not as frequent as they should be.

I really REALLY wanted to build something without using AI after having spent months and months getting a bit too complacent. And this is the first idea that came to mind. Of course to celebrate this occasion I went for a technology I hadn't used in almost a decade: jQuery!!!

You can find the repo here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai
You can play around with the tool on fccview.github.io/ackchyually-ai

Few disclaimers:

• I am a full stack javascript developer (with extensive knowledge of php and a very good grasp of shell). This means majority of the detection will be revolving around javascript, if you develop in a different language and you feel like you know AI patterns in that language PLEASE do create a pull request so we can make the detection even more accurate for other type of syntax!
• The tool uses MY OWN metrics, this is doing what I usually do to see if something is (in my opinion) been made with AI and barely reviewed by a human. It's not gospel, it's not a scientific method, it's most definitely going to be flawed, so keep it with a grain of salt, it can always be improved and collaboration/community support will definitely help with it
• I don't hate AI, on contrary I enjoy using it and I find value in not needing to "google it" whenever I hit a blocker, more times than not, AI has a valid solution that can be used, refined and applied properly. What I have mostly an issue with is people randomly generating code, not reviewing it and trying to sell you the moon when they barely understand the architecture of what they built
• Please do not make this post a fight between pro/against AI individuals, that's not the aim of it

All the patterns I am using to identify possible AI code are here: https://github.com/fccview/ackchyually-ai/tree/main/data if you come up with more patterns/ideas and have more ideas on what to look for please reply here, open an issue and/or make a pull request, but at ONE CONDITION, do NOT use AI for this. It'd go against the core principle of this one pure little app I decided to build <3

Hi all!

Just a quick update on Scatola Magica - a self hosted file transfer and management system I built - it's almost out of beta and I'd love to have people test it out and raise issues on github in case something is incredibly off.

Repo: https://github.com/fccview/scatola-magica

Quick youtube demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pvn0KHxzesE

enable subtitles in the demo for some commentary

Some quick highlights on the features I wanted that made me build this:

• Drag/drop anywhere to upload files/folders (yes even unzipped folders)
• Copy a file and paste it straight on the UI to upload it
• Copy some text and paste it straight in the UI to create a .txt file with the pasted text
• Click on the recursive button to see all files within all folders, multi select them all and download as zip (regardless from if they are in the same folder or not)
• Full on, easy to use encrypt/decrypt of files using the keys generated from the app OR any random public key I may want to use
• Encrypted file transfer
• (for my own taste) Slick UI.

The latest update features full on PGP encryption, transfer encryption (I don't want to call it e2e because files do end up decrypted on the server unless you purposely upload them via the "upload encrypted file", but it's effectively e2e, they get encrypted on your browser - requires https/localhost - are transferred encrypted and get decrypted once safe on your server).

I also have added some fun theming options for people who, like me, grew up in the late 90s, bit of nostalgia never hurts. This is fully featured in the demo video

Some of you may know me for my two other apps I have published here jotty and cronmaster, been a developer for half my life and all I do in my spare time is code and create open source apps. Been into self hosting for quite a while and I have very specific tastes and want very niche features, so I always end up building my own applications, it's a good way to keep up with latest tech and keep the love for my job alive.

Let me know if you like it! Super proud of this one, I am really enjoying using it in my homelab.

Hi all!

Some of you may know me for jotty and cr*nmaster, today I wanted to share my latest creation, it happened on a whim, someone on our discord server needed a simple and lightweight file sharing system (something that works similarly to dropbox) and I really wanted to challenge myself and learn the latest standards for next15/react19 (i'm a tech lead in a software engineering company I, use nextjs/react at work so I tend to try and learn stuff on my own time to not be left behind).

Anyhow! I really wanted to make something that felt.. magic (hence why the name Scatola Magica - Italian for magic box).

Repo url: https://github.com/fccview/scatola-magica

My plan was to make something that

• Allows folder upload (it was a must)
• Allows uploading from ANYWHERE by just dropping a file on the page (yes you can literally drop a file in the settings page and it WILL still get uploaded)
• Breaks files in chunks and uploads them in parallel (this way it truly feels stupidly fast)
• Looks/feels nice and professional (still working on it, it's a beta)
• If you copy something in your clipboard and paste it, it'll upload it (not text, literal files).
• Allow users to upload files onto your server within their own folder, no need for permissions, works like an operative system, each user have their own folder they have access to (unless they are admin, at which point they see anything you mounted on the docker image/anything in the dedicated upload folder)

There's a bunch of shortcuts, it already has OIDC login and most things have been documented in the repo howto/ folder.

Short term goals

• E2E encryption (or some sort of encryption DURING upload)
• Better upload feedback when uploading folders with tons of files (it currently hangs until it starts uploading, not great UX)

I always get a few every single post, so let's get the cat out of the bag, no, this is NOT vibe coded, yes, I obviously use AI in my workflow - what developer wouldn't in 2025 - especially in my personal projects, doesn't take away the huge amount of work I put in everything I do :)

Remember this is still a beta, it may be a bit quirky and have bugs, feedback are EXTREMELY appreciated and feel free to open issues on the github page, I am fairly active and keep an eye on things. Another way to directly contact me is via the official discord for my apps - you can find that on the repo, I don't want to spam things here.

Hope you like it :)