Let this be a reminder to never trust any service be it one ran by a billion dollar company, to one ran by volunteers. You will be eventually screwed over. Make backup plans, and self-host whatever you can so nothing can be taken from you. For Git forges, I personally recommend Gitea[1], or Forgejo[2] (a Gitea fork by Codeberg)
It’s probably not too important to choose a service that you think you can trust fully, because that trust might be broken at some point. But having an identifier that can be swapped to different backends, so people can find you again when the host inevitability changes, is a stronger strategy.
I think the importance of owning domain names will increase, and using those as the canonical identifier of a project will give it more permanence. The procedures for seizure and censorship with domain names are better established and understood.
Self-hosting based on an external project is still a dependency on Someone Else to keep it up to date, unless you have both the time and skill to take over maintenance of that project.
I’m referring to the self hosted part. The outside world can send pull requests via the public GitLab mirror, or they can actually also access my self hosted GitLab instance via its public address - although I doubt anyone would bother.
(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)
Yeah. Buying my own domain and migrating my email to it is one of the best things I've ever done. Setting up wireguard into my LAN permanently changed the way I used computers. Looks like it's time to get myself a VPS and just start hosting even more stuff.
Sovereign personal infrastructure is amazing. Highly recommended. Dealing with the government's rules and their politics is obnoxious enough. I'm starting to really lose patience with all of these communities.
Why? Banning abuse is fine, and disliking Cryptocurrency projects at a moral level is fine, but running a coffee hosting service and putting your moral judgements on projects like this just seems childish and unserious.
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
I'm also banned from the site for some reason despite never having been there before. Though I suspect my IP is on someone's naughty list for some reason seeing as I get far more captchas on the internet than I feel I should be getting.
It's the lack of attention to detail that bugs me. It's just bad policy making. Writing good policies that encourage the right behaviour and discourage the wrong behaviour, policies that promote a good culture, are HARD.
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
Maybe they want to push those people away with their policy. You know, business who see their ethics stance as an overreach, and free speech absolutists, maybe Codeberg is fine with those people not being around.
We've had enough time with crypto as a technology to see that it provides strictly negative value to the world. Banning all related projects wholesale is not unreasonable, in my book.
Do you just care to provide code, or do you want people to be able to create issues, send PRs, make forks? Open source is social, and self hosting git forges isn't the answer for many projects (especially as spam is a big problem, and has been for years, even before LLMs).
Well, GitHub seems unlikely to randomly ban your project if it fits within an entire category of services some admin arbitrarily decided they don't like.
This was voted on by the association members, with ~500 votes as far as I've seen. It's not the arbitrary politics of "some admin", rather the arbitrary politics of mob mentality.
In the words of the person who announced the ban, when moderating a discussion on it 8 months prior:[1]
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
Well, if you're not part of the community, what do you care?
Are you saying you are opposed to this on the grounds that anything could happen in the future? That doesn't really make sense. Yes, anything could happen. Yes, people change. That is true in nearly all contexts.
If you're asking in good faith, you participate in the community democratically and try to influence others. Just like normal.
There was a vote held for this decision, it was 306-154.
It's a bit of an inappropriate comparison though, since restaurants are ubiquitous and reasonable GitHub alternatives are vanishingly rare. People are quite rightly more troubled when providers in a low-cardinality space become unviable.
You can literally take the exact same software that Codeberg uses, Forgejo, and stand up your own alternative with different policies, with the only real cost being operational in nature. It seems less the case that it's a "low-cardinality space", and more that people feel entitled to other people's labour under their own terms.
They have 1085 Voters, only 306 Voters voted for the proposal, and it passed. That might clear their governance requirements on paper, its certainly not a majority of their eligible voting community.
Ok, have you ever been part of a directly democratic organization? Not everyone shows up to every meeting or every vote. An organization I was a part of had quorum at 10%.
I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.
The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.
An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.
Working 40 hours a week is a political number.
Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.
I'm trying to find more information about their politics. But all I found was their bylaws and a gay flag. Maybe I'm supposed to read between the lines?
In the left-wing spheres here, terms such as "political act" or "solidarity" are just bloat used to make your message sound more left wing. It's a faux pas not to virtue signal in a way that sounds radical and ensures that it won't affect anyone from outside your bubble as well.
An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.
> the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives.
They do not believe this because this is simply not the reality we live in
> Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
They are correct in this view. No matter how "apolitical" platforms like Github and various maintainers of open source projects pretend to be, the reality is that creating, hosting and distributing code is highly political and should be treated as such.
Yeah. It's like everybody's forgetting that github also bans things, such as certain projects that receive DMCA takedown requests.
And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.
It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.
No, it's not. If you see everything through these political lense, you end up constantly in a us vs them mentality. Or a "you're either with us, or against us". I don't think it's healthy.
They are voluntarily choosing to be a publisher. Publishers are responsible for the actions that the users do on their platform.
States are happier with and want more publishers as it's easier to censor, add surveillance and control them than neutral platforms.
The few past times when Cloudfare censored politically was interesting as they quickly made apologies because they want to be seen more as a neutral platform than a service that nation states can control.
It's why modern internet legislation across all parties and across all nations is geared towards changing platforms into publishers.
And it's why the services that we would have seen to be independent and neutral in the past are choosing this new paradigm.
I guess that brings up the question of why do people use Codeberg in the first place. From what I understand, it's a decision based on values right rather than cost, functionality, or convenience. Well here you go, more values, enjoy!
I used it for a while because I write free software and Codeberg was aligned with that. I went back to GitHub because I couldn't get their CIs to work. Now that they banned "heavy LLM usage" I won't be going back there I guess.
And has a very vocal/opinionated owner. You know what you're getting with Sourcehut. (And I don't mean that in a bad way).
Rightly or wrongly, Codeberg had a different feel. For a while it felt like it was trying to be a refuge from Github. But then again, maybe that was projecting something on them that they didn't intend.
Once again, the stability of a BDFL is vindicated.
Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros—Debian’s governance is slow but functional—but it seems to need guardrails around the process. (From what I can tell, an excruciating process is the best guardrail. Glacially slow decision-making means that mobs burn themselves out before they get to voting.)
I think there is a slight difference between open source and government there. With open source you can just leave and pick another one. Or start your own.
Well I suppose that's also technically true of governments...
I wouldn't call Drew DeVault stable, he crashed out after 4chan simultaneously exposed his creation of the RMS report alongside his huge loli porn fixation.
He may not be, but the product has been. Same goes with Theo and OpenBSD.
Hyper-productive people are often volatile. Putting up with it is a necessary tradeoff, as the systems they produce often fill a niche that nobody else will serve adequately.
Guys like Theo have a baseline to uphold and I think decades of dealing with the public on an open project with specific goals that need to be met would turn anyone sour. People respect him for his actual work though, like they used to with Torvalds before he got bought out by IBM.
Drew I think is just kind of a dick who has a history of putting his personal crusades before delivering a product people want. I remember a few years back sourcehut being reported as unstable and he went and lashed out at people who were complaining to him about it instead of fixing the issues. And he banned crypto projects cause he doesn't like them, at least Codeberg held it to a vote.
Patrick Volkerding is a pretty stable guy, I think he's the model more BDFLs should strive to be.
Patrick is an unusual exception; I’d actually put people like Drew, Theo, and pre-corporate Linus in the midpoint. The opposite extreme of Patrick would be unfortunate cases like Reiser and Ian Murdock.
I think Drew suffers a little from lack of focus. I greatly appreciate his work on Harelang, sway, and aerc for instance, but these are quite far from his Sourcehut work. (I can see how aerc and Sourcehut dovetail with the plaintext email focus, at least.)
The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg. The fact that they have ideological commitments that make them think banning cryptocurrency projects is a good idea is a separate good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
Yes, and people should think about this much more than they do, when it comes to more popular services that also make ideological decisions about what user content to disallow.
Full self-hosting without Tor has it too, as your ISP can ban you, as Kiwifarms found out.
(KF got banned from Cloudflare, then had a lot of trouble finding an ISP, eventually made their own, and then had trouble finding upstreams. You might wonder what they did that was so bad but not illegal - that's a long story.)
Exactly, I will no longer be recommending Codeberg moving forward for the same reason I don’t recommend GitHub. Political risk is a real concern for the projects I most care about.
I don't like crypto but this is poor reasoning, hastily implemented, and given very little time for discussion. There does not seem to be any concrete plan for notifying impacted projects or giving them a roadmap to migrate.
This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.
This was proposed 8ish months ago, and the annual assembly had this open for votes for 2ish months. I do think there was time for discussion, but I agree that there is poor reasoning.
Making the proposal fit all the nuances would no doubt be a nightmare in an association structure with so many members distributed around the world, we've had 6h+ long meetings for deciding on wording of a controversial policy in our e.V., and that was with everyone involved in the same room.
Codeberg may simply not be the right forge for many projects, which is probably fine, but does leave a gap for a good non-big-tech forge alternative (tangled isn't a good alternative, fwiw).
It's a shame that such a film of commercial and criminal slime surrounds big new technologies like crypto/AI that could otherwise be used for net good. But this is where we're at.
It's the whole world. It's the current zeitgeist. Everything is for money extraction and everyone is a resource whose money is to be extracted. Anyone who tries to resist will quickly be moneyless, then homeless, then foodless, then dead. Resistance is futile.
Commercial and criminal activity are not actually the same.
Also commercial activity tends to happen when everyone involved in the activity comes out ahead, so placing it as opposed to "net good" is perhaps a bit dubious.
I'm not sure how this interacts with open source principles. I think they are free to do whatever they want with their own website and indeed with open source tooling, but as a host for open source it could conceivably conflict with those principles.
A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.
More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.
I mean that's how I personally would define ethical. But anytime someone makes a claim like that, you have to ask "by what standard." And it's usually just "me."
As with the AI ban this was a community decision done by a majority vote. It seems that most people commenting or writing articles in the last few days don't have a Codeberg account or never visit the forum.
I think their own community can make their own rules. My only thought in doing so the description of what they represent would then be subject to those rules.
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
Codeberg is a community steered project. If participating isn't something you're interested in, it's probably not the right fit for you. There are other Forgejo hosts (you could even be one yourself) where you can be the king of your own castle.
iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
Given that the actual number of paying users is probably low, it sounds like it would be relatively cheap to disrupt policy for someone with deep pockets.
How is this a failure mode? Sounds like a good idea to me to let the members decide who they want in the club. Just wish this could also be done for national borders.
consumer co ops are broken because you can pay to get in. any bad actor whos rich enough can get thousands of people to join and vote in a corrupt way. and if you make it invite only you defeat the whole point.
imo the best way to fix is with a hybrid model where consumers pay member fees to get discounts but decision making is down to workers, basically how it was before shareholder supremacy.
Yes it's community run and you have to be member to get a vote. Paying fees as member is one of the most common ways how similar structures work outside software. Even politcal parties work this way.
An e.V. (eingetragener Verein) is a legal structure in Germany, the tldr is (I'm not a lawyer this isn't legal advice):
• there has to be an annual assembly where all members get invited to
• members may send in proposals, which get voted on during the assembly (in codebergs case the voting is done asynchronously, you get like 14 days to fill in your votes)
• members elect the people on the board
• the e.V. also needs to have formal bylaws for which any change has to be voted on and it's a bunch of paperwork to change them (see https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....)
A member is someone that signs up and pays a membership fee (currently that's at least 24€/year, see https://join.codeberg.org/).
So yes, the people that pay get to vote. But we're also the ones sending money in to pay for the servers (which is the main source of income for Codeberg), since the e.V. is considered charitable I'm pretty sure this is legally a donation but im not gonna pretend to know things about our tax system.
I get that this sounds strange to people outside of Germany but it's a very common thing here, your local football club is an e.V. for example.
It's also not that rare within the foss/software/nerd space, KDE and the CCC are both Vereine as well.
putting aside the saying that goes something like "51% of the animal population votes to eat the other 49%", it takes a special kind of person to be both aware of such a vote happening and also care to participate in it.
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
e.V. members get to send in proposals which are voted on in the (yearly) general assembly, this was one such vote.
So everyone who voted is known by their full name and address (a legal requirement for an e.V. in Germany). There is no sabotage here.
The “majority” is a fiction. I received no email from Codeberg, nor was I aware that a vote was taking place. I use Codeberg as my main code forge. My projects are not vibe-coded, but some are indirectly related to cryptocurrency in that they use some of the same technologies. This decision appears arbitrary, and I no longer trust Codeberg to host my code for the long term. What will the 'majority' come up with next year?
Yes, Drew did a much better job managing this, and his reasoning was more excusable (people were using the build system to mine crypto and eating up resources). I still don’t like it, but I get it, and at least it was handled professionally.
This is an interesting development. I think for the forseeable future, more and more people (who run and/or own products or platforms like Codeberg) will continue to be more selective on what they accept on their platforms.
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
Seems fine to me. It was decided by a community vote; it's their site and their rules. The people complaining about those damn ideologicsts or whatever seem to be missing the point in that they are equally as ideological just in a different direction.
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
I'm not personally a fan of this move or the vibe coding rule. That being said, I genuinely wonder how many people complaining about the rule are personally affected. Seems weird to me to complain about a service setting its own rules when you don't engage with it or contribute to it.
They don't have to be affected to be worried. It's how it was done and possibilities of further bans that is worrisome.
I have small open source projects that I won't move to Codeberg ever now because I don't want to waste any mental energy pondering if I might get banned in the future.
For example I have a stock trading backtracking strategy test tool. Will they ban anything related to fintech in the future because it is deemed evil? I don't want to have to think about that.
Will they ban my crappy game macroing tool to automate some simple repetitive game actions because it is considered cheating or against some game ToS? I don't care and I don't want to have to care about a possible ban. It's a glorified auto clicker to prevent RSI health issues ffs.
Great, nothing of value was lost. I get that you aren't used to people bending over backwards trying to try to cater to you in order to sell you something and get your money. And the kind of social power dyamics that creates. But in this scenario, a group of people deciding democratically what to do with their platform, your hypothetical future potential (mis)use of their resource is really quite meaningless.
The mindset of today's Germans hasn't changed much over the last century, only the symbolism is banned. As can be seen by the most recent election results.
I don't see what it has to do with Codeberg though.
Publishing platforms’ censorship policies affect readers because they affect discovery and decide, like a parent, what you should or should not be allowed to read.
Weird example. Kids don't get to choose what parents they have. Nor can they just get rid of their parents if they don't like them. There is no reason you have to use codeberg when you can choose another platform or host your own.
I'll be more sympathetic to your view if similar rules are imposed by GitHub, given its network effect and many software ecosystems' dependency on GitHub on an infrastructural level. But codeberg is not that.
Crypto shills have alot of money and bots to push their agenda. Issue is the community is so toxic and scammy at this point it might be more disliked than AI slop by anyone with a pulse.
It's HN. They like to think they are better than reddit, but in the end this site is a huge echo box, and any outlier causes these reactions, particularly when it's something or someone taking a moral/ethical stance
Yes, many years ago in college we would describe HN as "reddit with a college degree". The same " echo chamber" arguments, but more snob and with less spine
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
Google/Microsoft offer services in exchange for money. They are not tax exempt charities purporting to do beneficial work for society to earn that status. And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
Not entirely, but I think between the lines yes. They have a 100MB combined limit each person's non-promoted (i.e. not a serious project) repositories.
This is a good thing. Crypto is 95% scams, and the remaining 5% just WAY too risky for the normal-joe. Overall, crypto (bitcoin specially) is just a useless energy consuming nightmare.
The only good thing about crypto is we can send money easily to stupid countries without any hassle and crazy forex exchange. Other than that, i don't see any value in crypto.
I hear this over and over. What kind of privacy are we taking about here? You mean X gives Y 100 bucks in cash privacy? Or purchasing a house where there is no paper trail, no knowledge of who is the previous/current owner and no insurance at all kind of privacy?
Would you be happy to send your kids to a school that no one knows whos the owner, who operates it and if there is any kind of hazards and/or insurance/maintenance? Lets not even talk about how and what the teachers get paid, as its all fully private.
It is perfectly fine (and in fact standard) to identify people without any payment processor involved.
Someone arguing for the ability to pay someone without surveillance does not argue for a world where nobody knows each other anymore. That would be awful, of course.
Yes. Monero is the equivalent of spending cash online. Any service that accepts monero still has order numbers to deliver the product. Or requires an address if it must be shipped.
We can send normal FIAT pretty much anywhere in the world, instantly. There might be some places that are truly out-of-reach, but at the same time, crypto is probably not working there neither as a) there i literally no computers and b) no way to use the crypto. So you end up exchanging crypto for fiat, and pay a high fee in the process.
As it stands, AI has already surpassed the energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, and is also burning the entire planet [0]. It is only going up due to the data center build out. [1][2]
The cryptocurrency industry already found ways to migrate off of PoW to Proof-of-Stake so there exists an efficient alternative to reduce emissions.
AI still does not and the hard requirement is to build more data centers to keep up with the scale, hence higher token prices, energy prices, electronics and water.
While that's true, it's unrelated to hosting code. A reliable code hosting site should be agnostic to content. Once they start making editorial decisions about what projects to host, why should anyone trust them with their project?
I just fundamentally disagree that hosting sites should be agnostic to content.
Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.
Yes? Every hosting provider should be considering what they want to host. Of course it's fine for providers to take some sort of speech maximalism stance if they want to, but it is also reasonable not to.
So you think Codeberg should not host projects in the categories I listed?
Or if you think they should, should they also provide guarantees to projects that the rules will not be suddenly changed, disrupting the project and community?
If not, and you’re a developer, why would you want to host there?
Why would P2P/E2EE software be banned? Makes no sense to even compare that to crypto. Its like saying we ban C because the bitcoin is written in it.
> Software that gets used to leak state secrets?
Thats not really a "thing". If someone uploads something of the sorts, it probably going to be taken down. VPNs follow the same rules as P2P/E2EE, and has nothing to do with crypto.
Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Chat Control 2.0? Public pressure campaigns against encryption? The mob decides that it’s “fascist” to prevent snooping?
> Thats not really a "thing".
WikiLeaks and SecureDrop would disagree.
> Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Yes, and I’m saying that this is a bad thing. Obviously there may be limited means to contest legal actions (outside of decentralization), but GitHub has been iffy regarding ToS applications in the past.
Well, definitely makes me inclined to never use Codeberg for source hosting if they can just get together and decide to ban an entire category of source repo.
Downvoters: if someone indignantly announces they are leaving a service in a manner that suggests its a loss for the service, finding out if they are a paying customer - and in this case, one that can vote on the subject at hand - adds to the discussion.
Codeberg has 0 paying customers. It is a non-profit providing services for free and not a business.
Membership in the non-profit requires fee paid by EU bank transfer and gives voting rights on questions like this but is separate accounting from use of the free sevices.
All this is explained front-and center or codeberg.org.
In the prior words[1] of Gusted, one of the board members that announced the ban:
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Pretending to run an inclusive git hosting service for FOSS and then attacking your own users because their code is the wrong type of algorithm isn't politics, it's just being an asshole.
Nope. It's not "attacking own user base". These comments are ridiculous now. It's safeguarding a open project by removing scammers and abusers that exploit it. Scammer should host their own or use github.
Kinda seems like you're doing the exact thing the parent comment is talking about, except in addition to laundering your disagreement through the lens of "politics", you're just adding the word "asshole".
That doesn’t answer the question. What is the underlying ideology/value system? Lots of people would disagree with your second claim, so if that’s what they believe then this itself implies all kinds of nonstandard values.
Welcome to the world. Things do not magically happen, they are done by people. If you want something done right you have to do it yourself. To lessen the load you could also form or join a group of people who want it done the same way.
Just because the fundamental principles cannot trivially be summarized into a single sentence, doesn't mean they don't exist. It's a member association, and the fundamental principles form organically from its membership. That's... how social groups work.
This is far less controversial than their anti-AI stance which passed today.
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
I'm strongly anti-AI, but i upvoted your comment because it's the most reasonable one (in opposition to the AI ban) i've read so far. I haven't read those mastodon threads, but that sounds like a weird discourse. Are they from codeberg eV members or random passers-by (like me)? Would you mind sharing some links to some of those resources?
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912"You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look.""Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Both those threads have other examples, and there are plenty more other threads like them. It has the smell of a smug in group that allows no dissent.
I am also 80% certain there were comments on the PR (https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253) along similar lines that were removed but I have no backups or screenshots to backup that accusation.
Hey, this one wasnt a fit but i think there are still so many options to consider over doubling down on centralization. Maybe P2P is actually a better fit than federated for git and open source collaboration? nostr, radicle, reticulum?
Self-hosting classic forge is great but does require domain name and infra with uptime. These p2p solutions are more like bittorrent where you can clone as long as someone is seeding and git already has commit signature as building block for trust.
I dunno, I just felt for the health of the project and getting contributors it made no sense. GH sucks but it comes with social amplifiers that tend to attract people. e.g. I had everthing over at Codeberg for 11 months but rarely had new "followers" over there, but still acquired "stars" on the read-only GH mirror of it.
I was already hosting my own CI, I never used Codeberg's because I was trying to be responsible with their resources because I liked [past tense] them. Getting back on GH actually means I don't have to do that anymore, I will enjoy leaching from Microsoft.
I do have my own self-hosted Gerrit I use for other somewhat more private things. But self-hosting has its own hassles (backups, security, etc).
And in fact one of those other things is in fact my own project to make a "forge" type thing. Vaguely similar to what Dorsey announced the other day (integrated git, chat, code review, code browsing, llm agent interaction, etc into one dynamic r) but I started on it quite some time ago, it's built on my own bespoke runtime, and it's generally more ambitious ... but also I'm not a techbro billionaire so I don't have the resources to finish it right now and I have to work on other projects.
That makes the decision to not use Codeberg even easier for many.
If you are after a sustainable and stable code repository to host your projects then Codeberg disqualified themselves. It goes down regularly as much as GitHub and loses to GitHub on discovery.
Now, you can potentially lose your entire account and projects by posting a repo that can have AI with auto-complete.
If Linus Torvalds (pro-AI) published his scuba-diving software [0] there, which there is a CLAUDE.md file in the repository, it would get banned.
It also makes choosing it easier for others. “Hosting on Codeberg is a good indicator my code is handcrafted”, or somesuch.
I don’t want nor am I interested in arguing whether “handcrafted” is good or bad, just positing that some people would prefer it. May not be great for [i]growth[/i], but it’s not like Codeberg is a service by a megacorp aiming to corner the market (one of the reasons why everything is regressing to mediocre slop these days, but I digress).
That Torvalds plays for the other team is irrelevant. But if we’re mentioning him, one should recall that it was ol’ swears-a-lot himself who said “fork it or just walk away” on a similar topic.
Bad example, you obviously didn't read the codeberg ToS. Codeberg banned projects that « mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools ». subsurface is apparently quality software with different contributors, and in the recent commit history i only saw a handful of commits assisted by LLMs.
subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
> Codeberg banned projects that « mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools ».
Since you studied the entire policy, what is the methodology in determining a project that uses generative AI-tools or not that covers the ban? What does "mostly" mean here? Is there a percentage defined? Or did they look at sourcehut's Anti-AI policy and start from there?
This is actually a good example since people can just fork existing "human made" software, (Free software permits you to do that) and run agents on it and hide the "slop" commits to circumvent that policy. Maybe someone would like in Rust and use an agent to do that. Or continue it as is but just adding new features quickly.
> subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
...for now and it will eventually have more gen AI code anyway.
subsurface already has generative AI tools committing to the code base and the presence of the CLAUDE.md guarantees that. The same can be said with Vim which has an AGENTS.md file.
People always say they hate centralized markets, but whenever a market starts regulating to create its own distinct character, they push back.
Honestly, I think this measure actually gives Codeberg a competitive edge in terms of code quality.
I think we're now seeing a pattern where, under a 'free' large market, regulations are being used to create unique market identities. That's my take—it depends on what you regulate, which determines the market's character.
Personally, I've noticed that when Codeberg announced regulations around AI code, most of the comments cheered. But when the same people talk about cryptocurrency regulations, they get angry. It seems like people just want to regulate what they don't like, not what they do.
I won't use Codeberg myself, but I think this policy is reasonable. I've decided that what you regulate defines your market's identity.
Wow. I have never worked on any cryptocurrency projects and never intend to, but I will certainly be staying very far away from Codeberg because of this.
There are some levels of censorship that make sense for a code forge - “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”, etc. But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software sends the message that this isn’t a safe place to host any of your repositories. If the moral landscape shifts in the future, how can you be sure your project won’t be next on the chopping block?
My rule of thumb: just use the most mainstream options unless I have a very, very strong reason to do otherwise. The mainstream options will screw you, but the niche options will screw you in totally unexpected ways.
Are these comments written buy bots? It's the mainstream ones that have been screwing people without any recovery options, there were many horrifying top posts in hn itself in last few years.
Yes yes yes, we know. Git is decentralised, you can just trivially push* anywhere!
* - the code. Just the code. only the code. Nothing but the code.
You don't need the issues, the roadmap, the ACL of which human can do what, the API access keys for third parties, the artifact repos. Just. The. Code.
Somewhat arsey in my tone? Yeah. But having done two large scale (100+ repos) forge migrations of our company's client projects (SVN -> github, then later on github -> bitbucket) and seeing people completely ignore the metadata surrounding the code that isn't as easy to "just push" anywhere, somewhat justified.
I strongly disagree: I think this is a perfectly acceptable action. No project is entitled to host their project there, nor is any project compelled to do so, so I don't see why there is any harm in having this instance of Forgejo moderate itself as it sees fit. They have no moral requirement to support all kinds of software.
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
> No project is entitled to host their project there
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
Codeberg isn't competing against Github for market share, it serves a specific demographic with a specific ideology. Anyone is welcome to use any other host they want for their crypto and AI projects, with whatever policies align with their preferences. Or make your own with blackjack and hookers.
There shouldn't even be "default choices" or "huge network effects" in FOSS anyway. That's just another form of centralization.
Did they, though? Do we have numbers on how many cryptocurrency projects were removed from Codeberg because of this, since GitHub is the default choice? Or are you suggesting that there is going to be a significant split because of this?
I agree that this is probably going to cause some fragmentation, but I'm not convinced that it will do so in a meaningful matter or at the scale at which it is problematic to the free and open source ecosystem.
For what it's worth, Forgejo is working on federation[1], which might address your networking effect concerns?
> If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs.
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
So far it is now (unofficially) The hoster of Human-made™ non-crypto™ Free Software so far it is fully legal under the jurisdiction or country it resides in (Germany).
That's a lie anyway. I know for a fact that major open source projects have AI contributions merged into main. At this point pretty much all the ones that take over 5 minutes to compile have some LLM generated code.
> Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them
What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].
Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
> Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
Absolutely. And it would be even better if the moderators each wrote a short summary that’s an honest attempt to describe what their individual ideologies are.
I respect institutions that clearly state their biases much more than those that pretend they have none.
Fair enough! But surely you would allow them to update their summary on what their ideologies are, right? People change, after all. And people should know when those ideologies change too.
We should also make sure people read all the blurbs before they join a website. Maybe we should call it the Terms of Service? ;)
Despite most websites having nothing but legalese in there, Codeberg's is pretty short and human readable by comparison. I know most people have been desensitized to it, but I haven't heard of any better way of coveying them at an institutional level.
The problem isn’t about ToS or other kinds of rules, it’s about what drives them.
When I join a community, I would like to be able to predict whether tomorrow, they might ban Chinese projects, or projects written in Lisp, or projects that only run on Windows.
This doesn’t follow from the ToS, it follows from what the platform’s values are. Codeberg does publicly state its claimed values, but they don’t imply these new bans.
It’s bad because it’s subjective. It’s a liability to host anything there now - their opinion of your product category could shift tomorrow… oh wait that already happened
Exactly. It's not so much that there are rules, it's that the rules are decided by random popularity vibes. It's not clear what vibes they will be smoking tomorrow.
The least they could do as a nonprofit is make users aware that a core tenet of the service is to promote/ban whatever content the community voting decides any given day, and hopefully what ideology they are following.
Otherwise any serious person would to well to stay away from Codeberg; you don't know if your project will be in the community's sights in the next vote.
That was not a random popularity vibes. One of the discussion was from 3 years ago. Taking a political stand is part of codeberg DNA. If codeberg had no opinions and no politics then it would just never have existed.
Unless your project is very sketchy to begin with, you have nothing to fear. I would understand this kind of fear if we talked about a company whose CEO dictates directions every month or so. But this is a non-profit with sane individuals and debates.
Imagine for a second if that were actually the case. Most rules are determined by physics, science, data, or something tangible. Food safety, aviation, electrical codes, even sports rules are based on math and statistics.
You are arguing with a strawman. No one said anyone is entitled to host there. They are saying it's just a bad policy because it makes it an unreliable place to host projects when you don't know what will be banned next. You are "strongly disagreeing" with something other than what the OP said.
Noone is changing their mind overnight. These discussions on Codeberg have been going on for years, and you know, if only from reading HN, that a certain portion of humanity is strongly opposed to cryptocurrency and LLM slop.
There's nothing surprising, new, or shocking about codeberg banning cryptocurrency projects. This is the logical conclusion of them being a non-profit acting for the good of humanity and not for the crypto grifters.
you shouldn't if that concerns you. Any organization or project that's value driven is going to turn people away who feel they run afoul of those values, that's the point. It's a non-profit, they don't gain anything from trying to serve everyone.
That's a controversial stance. The first statement of not using codeberg hosted projects to train LLMs makes sense. But to outright ban LLM coded projects seems just silly. If the problem is that users have too many vibe coded projects, then limiting the number of projects seems like a more reasonable stance. To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them. I get that this is being spun as an effort to save resources, but this is a pretty blunt way to accomplish this. And a great way to alienate a lot of potential users.
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
I think you're right, quotas have been around as long as multi-user systems.
Their argument was economic, an economic solution would be good:
"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects"
Ultimately, democracy is a respectable form of government and the group is free to change their mind later.
> To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them.
here lies the fundamental misunderstanding by many people in this thread.
Is the objective of Codeberg to host as many projects as possible on its own server? I do not believe so!
The question then becomes "what is Codeberg's objectives?"
It's not to become the world's largest code forge instance! It's to build a set of FOSS tools for FOSS software development. Look at [0], for example, which lists alternatives.
But perhaps most importantly, the FOSS tooling can be self hosted, right? There's still a notion of freedom there.
Silly is how it is handled and communicated. I want clear rules, not a rant that electricity is expensive!
I have bunch of projects and sites there for a year+, most of them are llm generated.
What is a grace period for existing projects to move? What are criteria for deciding what is "vibe coded"? If i get banned, is the repo just deleted, or made readonly...
Codeberg had outage for last 5 days, where some repos could not be commited into. I expected post mortem analysis, not this debate!
Given that they're a non-profit membership association with explicitly political goals where every new user represents a direct cost to the organization, and not a startup on a comfortable cushion of VC moneybags looking to pump the numbers for a quick acquisition, I very much doubt that a "growth strategy" is what they're going for here.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion.
Where terms and conditions are concerned I really do value "easy answers".
They will just put it to user vote, same way all their policy is decided.
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
You’re trying to make a meaningless distinction to justify holding different parties to different standards: comments are HN’s core content, code is Codeberg’s core content.
HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.
Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?
You just expect platforms implement “no AI content” rules based on what you care about more. I mean you should leave the platform if you want to create more AI life’s work and they don’t let you, not everything works for everybody, but you can’t come out and object on principle when you accept it elsewhere. This is good for the people who want to signal there’s no AI slop in their work.
And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.
I was thinking recently about Dijkstra's position on proving the correctness of your programs, and how by his standards, we've all been going by vibes long before AI.
Well, I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is. Basically everyone has some idea, see how often many different people here on HN comment "this is pure slop".
Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.
Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.
But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.
And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.
There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.
> I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is.
There's no way for anyone reading their rules to know if their projects are slop. It's full of "mostly" and "significantly". That's virtually guaranteed to boil down to "we don't like it".
So "they didn't know how to define it" is about the most charitable interpretation I can muster. Alternative interpretations, such as "the vagueness is a feature since it enables selective enforcement", are also available, and they only get more and more uncharitable.
> Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable.
Had they wanted to define it, they would have done so.
> Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I have insight into their actions, and I'm perfectly capable of inferring context and motives from them.
> I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, it is desirable that things be precisely defined so that people can know where they stand. Depending on the exact definition, I may or may not be welcome. Therefore I'm not going back there without a precise definition.
Maybe you shouldn’t use a platform that lets the users vote on policy then?
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice:
> Side projects and experiments with little resource usage
> Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated
I really don't want to join a commons where something I make might be "tolerated in practice" based on a given moderator's vibe. Which I suppose is the message I was meant to receive from the issue that passed the vote.
It's an opinionated charity host for free software. Are you actually making free software or just dumping your junk that is technically free but no one uses? If the latter, they're telling you to go away.
Oh, shoot. Though I don't have many vibecoded projects, when I decided to move to Codeberg from Github the first project I pushed to codeberg was a vibecoded one
I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
Fun fact: They deliberately chose to host in the EU because they were concerned that malicious actors could abuse the DMCA by filing fraudulent copyright claims to take down legitimate software repositories.
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
I can't recall which, but I'm certain that I've encountered and probably used Codeberg-hosted things, and from that had gathered a vague positive impression of them.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
Did you even read the blog post or the ToS changes? You're either misinformed or lying. Banning projects that « mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools » is not the same as banning « all LLM assisted projects ».
I don’t think the slippery slope is a fallacy. If a group makes a change in one direction is it not more likely that they will continue making changes in that direction than if they had not made the initial change?
I mean, that's your right, but also they'll get new users too. So much of the internet is drowning in slop that any place that's still brimming with original content will likely see its stock go up, and will tend to attract people who still do original work, creating a virtuous cycle
Yeah I don't know. It's impossible to draw a clear line, but the overall effect is not hard to identify. If your work supports a community and creates value, you can reasonably expect the community's support. If your work leeches from a community, you can reasonably expect the community to turn on you.
To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value
To me, this all sounds like the kind of fuzzy reasoning and nondescript language that turns communities into popularity contests and backstabbing competitions.
If Codeberg wants to put a flag up to draw in every programmer with a personality disorder, well that may be their right, but it’s not a good idea.
>To me, this all sounds like the kind of fuzzy reasoning and nondescript language that turns communities into popularity contests and backstabbing competitions.
Welcome to society. There is no such thing as a meritocracy.
I love that way of thinking, but for me it's not intelligence but rather philosophy, community, and care (three things LLMs can mimic, but ultimately lack to an even greater degree than they lack intelligence)
Indeed it's almost like open source projects can use their collective intelligence and decide for themselves what's acceptable and what's not acceptable when it comes to free git hosting, irrespective of "the norm".
Tough. The world is fuzzy and nondescript. Platform says no porn, you ask if one bare nipple is porn. Platform says English only, you ask if it's okay to use loanwords. These would be good questions if you were programming a computer, but dumb questions to ask about a judge.
The real world (as in society) has labyrinthine processes and procedures, with multiple checks and balances, designed to ensure that justice is at least partially served. Codeberg appears to lack this.
And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.
But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.
Not to my knowledge, but without a structured framework for those decisions, I have little confidence that enforcement will remain fair and even-handed moving forward. I also suspect that the ambiguity of the “reputation” clause will be abused in the future.
Yes, the effect is it will become a toxic community where your project can be summarily judged and instantly dismissed as slop because there's an AGENTS.md file in the repository or LLM attribution in the commit messages.
...and? HN is already like that... I'm not here to give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm lookin' for minds at work. At the first sign that no mind is working, I'm gone
AI slop projects, or vibecoded projects, or projects made with heavy llm assistance, or whatever you want to call them are already divisive and the discussions about whether they aught be allowed are already causing strife in many communities.
Right or wrong many users are utterly uninterested in said content and wish that their existing communities could continue as they did prior to the onslaught. Naturally, some communities will decide to attempt to moderate in such a way that supports those users desires. As with most necessary moderation of online communities there will be gray areas and judgement calls and drama and abuse. There really isn’t an alternative.
Sloppy and low effort reply. Claude does a better job. I'd paste the output but it's against the rules on HN.
You can find it on lobsters though, where I did post the full reply along with the prompt in response to the exact same cop out. To this day, it's still the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire 300+ comment thread I posted it in. Not bad for a clanker, huh?
perhaps wasn't your intent, but this clearly demonstrates the benefit of those kinds of rules for everybody around both on codeberg and here. and you're still here
I allowed myself to believe that the public conversation had moved past the "free speech means that no one is allowed to control what others post on platforms they run". The obvious cases of it routinely get replies with the obvious counterarguments, so I thought maybe everyone had gotten the idea. Apparently not.
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
Codeberg's paying members can off course vote on policies of their own non-profit. More power to them. You have the freedom to not use their service. There are ample alternatives.
I'm... unsure how to feel. On one hand I have the utmost sympathy for the idea of pushing people away from disposable software and towards collaboration. On the other hand this will definitely devolve into name calling and vigilantism. On the third hand, Github is already drowning in slop. It takes up huuuuge amounts of resources and delivers a tiiiiny amount of value to the platform per line of slop code
You have to understand that this isn't about everyone being altruistic towards everyone else. When the industry declared that AI would replace humans, even perhaps make every single person worthless, they guaranteed beyond all doubt that the vitriol would reach at least these levels. There's no point in extending kindness to people whose stated goal is your extinction. At that point what's left is war.
Then war it is. Like I told the fine people of Lobsters, they're going to take out a lot of innocent people as collateral damage during their crusade. I've already soft quit that site, and there goes Codeberg as well. What can you do?
I don't disagree, but it is not within my power to do anything to change that. There exists no person who could call off the backlash to the AI movement
I used to post a lot more. I took the "be part of the community" rule pretty seriously and really tried. I dramatically cut down on my participation after the "ban AI slop" meta threads made me feel like I was not welcome due to my AI use. Getting straight up called a "slop fetishist" will do that.
Since then I've been mostly participating on veqq's lobster interview threads. My highest posting volume was in my own interview thread. The interview itself took place before all of these unfortunate events. Veqq is a really nice person, one of a select few who told me they were sad to see me go, even though we have different viewpoints on AI.
Personally, I'm overjoyed to see the internet stratify and the chuds depart for whatever libertarian/accelerationist pastures they're looking for. I just want to chat with human beings about human endeavors. If that shrinks my social network by several orders of magnitude — even better. Much easier to catch up.
Lobsters is the definition of a toxic community. Here at least you can create a throwaway account to have a controversial opinion. There you need vested invited, and get banned if you post some uncomfortable truth. Been there, done that. Same goes for mastodon.social.
Honestly? I don't remember exactly, something about a software project not being automatically bad for not implementing a code of conduct praising certain sexual deviances (woof)?
I clearly remember why my account with lots of photos was deleted from mastodon.social without warning: There was a poll "Have you donated to the Antifa", two options: no / I'm a fascist. I replied there is some more nuance to the topic, also in some jurisdictions the organization is listed as a terrorist organization, and as such it is illegal to do so, link to an example (us in those days, it was in the news). Well, apart from some nice photos nothing of value was lost, also it was a great lesson why you need to self-host and not rely on "self-moderating communities" or megacorps...
Some taboo of that "community"... much like free healthcare or unionization or illegal migration is slave labour (and class warfare against the working class, including legal migrants and legal guest-workforce) in disguise (was banned from a VC funded SV echo-chamber for this opinion) are taboos of this "community".
Guess I'm an extremist... or just Eastern-European.
It seems like the “Your organization needs to pass my personal moral purity test before I accept free hosting from it” posters aren’t really grasping how that is the opposite of a threat
It is like “I’m not taking anything from that food bank since they clarified that they won’t be accepting or doling out rat meat” like ok buddy, you do you
Your point is, they should do nothing about targeted hateful spam campaigns against their users? If someone starts flinging shit at your window, and you protested, I'd tell you to sit down and "quit the activism".
No, the parent was precisely saying it's perfectly fine to take position, and it's nothing new for codeberg. In particular, the linked article was not just about countering spam, but also against « far-right ideologies ». So it's nothing new or surprising that codeberg is political.
Time to move off of Codeberg. They provide a service, that's it. I don't want drama from my service providers, and censorship incurs drama. I think some censorship is needed (hate speech, CP), but I do not want projects deleted because someone running the service doesn't like how I make them, or what they are for. They have the right to do that, but I also have the right to vote with my feet and go elsewhere, and I'm doing that. LLMs assisting coding has it's place, crypto has its place, both have been overhyped and so we're now getting a rubberband effect as people express hatred of these things based on the hype - not on their legitimate purposes.
Prohibiting fraud or infrastructure abuse is one thing, but declaring entire categories of lawful software harmful to Codeberg’s reputation is another. They've ironically tanked Codeberg's reputation far more from these policy changes than any projects in that category could have possibly. After these changes, it is difficult for any business, or any project seeking stable infrastructure, to trust that its codebase won’t become unacceptable after the next member vote.
It's not ridiculous. If it was for me, i would ban anyone who use LLMs at all, so banning projects that « mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools » sounds very light to me, a reasonable middle-ground to rally everyone around.
Are you sure you don't feel insulted and threatened because you're yourself a sloperator, so it feels personal to have others criticize your practices from a moral standpoint? (i don't know, i haven't researched your profile)
If you work for a tech company, I can practically guarantee that it bans a lot of lawful behaviors on its platforms. Paypal bans or restricts online dating, cigarettes, and firearm accessories. Youtube demonetizes swearing. Facebook prohibits the sale of bodily fluids (I don't want to know what triggered that policy) and "used cosmetics".
If you're not interested in stuff like that when your company is doing it, but are up in arms about some other platform deciding that they don't like crypto, I think you should look in the mirror. Their reasoning is probably the same: they don't like it and don't want to put up with the task of sensibly policing the category.
It's a good decision to ban cryptocurrency projects. Such a project may be mostly fine, but considering overall cryptocurrency shady reputation it's better to keep it away.
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
I'd argue that it's more democratic than the EU, and has a target audience of members who actually want the service to continue going in this direction. You most likely wont be missed. Thankfully there are a million other places to host your code.
Fantastic! Codeberg just keeps getting better and better, properly moderating a healthy community which does not welcome the technolibertarian dystopia we've all been suffering through for far too many years now.
I'm not surprised many here are upset. Many here don't seem to understand the outrageous harms that a totally out-of-control tech industry has been foisting upon the planet. It's time to take a stand for a better path forward.
actual open source crypto projects are the opposite of a techno dystopia. ethereum wants to build a global root of trust (like iana but decentralized), railgun and monero are doing anonymous payments, and all of them let you avoid taxes. which is good if you live in a country where your taxes go to foreign genocide and the war on drugs.
all the harms come from for-profit companies that use crypto as a cover, like polymarket or stake. the contracts are on chain and might be open licensed but one company controls everything in practice with admin rights. and they make it hard to access directly without going through the proprietary frontend hosted on their servers.
the only ones who would ever want to host their code on codeberg are real community projects, because the corpos are all happy with github.
I was one of the commenters that was staunchly against this proposal on the original issue that was brought up 3 years ago. Imo their entire argument has always been straw man. Anyone who has spent enough time around the core Codeberg community knows how ideologically motivated their decisions are regardless of what they put out in their PR statements.
This incident coupled with the Forgejo one (In which they twisted the whole story and made Gitea look like the biggest villain in FOSS when in fact they orchestrated the whole drama by submitting a controversial PR that many people don't know about) made me quit and keep away from their hosting.
This is crazy. 1. Humans are turning energy in code too. 2. Business cannot afford "ultra-high-end-code" or dont want to. LLM's are the escape hatch for developers in those areas to increase throughput and quality (writing tests). Everything before llm's were already a burning piece of sh*t and now we actually can do smth about it.
1. that LLMs actually improve project quality, which may be true for projects with very clear style guides and test suites (eg. the linux kernel) but may also be false for 99% of projects (are the LLM tests testing good behavior or just random stuff?)
2. that codeberg's orientation is to host code for private businesses (it's a non-profit in which businesses may take part, but that's definitely not the target audience)
I believe that they (like every other non-governmental service) have the privilege to ban everything and everyone from their service for literally any reason they choose.
But this (and especially the AI ban) is a big red flag and I'm steering clear from Codeberg.
Even though I do not host on Codeberg, but I do run my own Forgejo, and have no particular interest in Cryptocurrency projects, I consider this a serious red flag as to me it indicates an activist tendency, for lack of a better word, that I do not want from an IT infrastructure provider.
All IT infrastructure providers are activists. The question is what is their politics? Github pushes for centralization, AI slop, and gathering code for the military-industrial complex. Twitter pushes for techno-fascism under our great and only leader Elon Musk. FSF pushes for liberal left-wing copyleft.
If you don't see the politics behind economic actors, i would recommend taking a closer look.
I see this as a higher evolution of simpler community tech projects, which are incapable of tackling or comprehending these things as a group. And so simpler projects will often neglect or reject taking them up altogether, using various restricting justifications. But the truth is this is a step for the community towards actually thinking about how you exist in the world that you live in and having a say in it. Congratulations.
Bitcoin lets me send my friend abroad money with minimal BS, I quite like it (other services like Wise take more commissions and have more delays), but also realize there's a lot of scam prjoects etc. out there.
Then again, Codeberg as a project can do whatever they want. I'm just happy that anyone can host Gitea, Gogs, GitBucket or GitLab or whatever they wnat. For my personal stuff Gitea works really nice with Woodpecker CI.
I'm sure many other hosted platforms don't have such stringent rules, though.
I wonder if we will see a fork of Forgejo and Codeberg (the latter is based on the former) that will allow for this and AI contributions. I would be interested in trying it out.
I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]:
> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?
The core argument they are making is one of resources, I can find myself seeing their point. Another abuse of the service would be to convert videos into ASCII text and check them into git, for example.
The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes.
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
That money had to have come from somewhere, whether it was taxpayers or individuals. What if I donated? Is it cool to just roll over and allow political groups to hijack a previously neutral service?
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes.
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
This step perfectly aligns with the political direction Codeberg had from the very start.
Who are you to now come in and demand they change to fit your political stance?
Codeberg? Did they? I know large corporations do it because they fear commercial retaliation, but Codeberg is a registered German charity by German citizens living in Germany and has absolutely no reason to give a flying fuck what the US president thinks. Which is incredibly based.
Can't every company do that at any time though? How is being on the other side of an ethical line different or more risky from being on the other side of a spreadsheet-driven line. One day you're in a green cell and it's all good, the next you're in a red cell and on the other side of what they care about (just green cells).
The decision to stop hosting such projects on codeberg will change nothing, it will just make it clear that its not a serious competitor.
Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter.
It just doesn't matter.
Companies chasing profitmaxxing (to use a fashionable pattern) are just as political, do you complain about those too? Anyway, the answer is the same here: If you don't like it, just don't use them.
Are we going to pretend that hosting open sourse software for free is an apolitical thing?
Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.
But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.
To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint.
Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural -
- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).
- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.
- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."
- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world.
So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
You know what's a real waste of energy?
The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.
That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can.
Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol
You think US is in culture war. But it’s not even comparable .
You have all spectrum in fight : ultra right , ultra left, ultra green , traitors to China , to Russia : Orban , Fico. Some of them just corrupted to worst African dictators level : kidnap bank people with money in the middle of the road .
On top of that their politics is multi layered . People with similar goals fight each other on EU / local level etc .
You project can always appear on the crossroad of such fight or they simply kidnap you and take you money
I'm probably repeating what others had said but might as well join in on the very classic hnews saga of talking about a conversational topic in super autistic detail lol.
On the one hand its there site so they can do what they want and tbh its pretty easy to self host your own git server nowdays (which i do) however the issue i do have with this and really its a wider issue i have with the industry as whole:
I feel like we focus way to much ideology's and moral grandstanding which we then insert that into tech projects so seeing stuff like this makes we want to avoid using this site with a 10 foot pole. Can we just focus on tech not some moral grandstanding about politics, crypto blah blah but i guess thats too hard of a thing to ask or something
If this, or the vibe-coding ban upsets you, you're not the target demographic of Codeberg. It's not a big tent project looking to host all the code in the word, like Github is. It's for principled, quality, open source, community-first software. Look at the explore page to see what that means: https://codeberg.org/explore/repos?q=&only_show_relevant=tru...
The entire point of Forgejo, the git forge that Codeberg runs on as well, is that you can run your own very easily. I've stopped having private repos on Github completely in favor of my own Forgejo instance, and it's way smoother and nicer. Codeberg was never meant for private repos, but if I get around to starting a new floss project that I want to put out there, Codeberg would be a great option!
And sure, right now there is no cross-forge collaboration, so you need to have multiple accounts. But forge federation is planned, eventually you should be able to contribute to your friend's project from your instance. If you don't wanna wait, go look at https://tangled.org/ or something.
The problem is that if you are the target demographic now, you’ll never know if you’re still next year or if you’ll be deplatformed and as such it makes for not a very reliable code host.
Slippery slope. AI and crypto are legitimetely controversial new technologies, though both have their uses. I can't imagine "offline mapping application" or "Linux CLI utility" or "self-hostable web app" being categories of software that become controversial in the future. Besides, migrating a repo to another Forgejo instance is simple enough.
"As of July 2028, Linux-specific projects are now banned from Codeberg - the Linux kernel development community believes in harmful and racist concepts like meritocracy"
The ban is not for "all blockchain-related projects", it's for "projects that harm the reputation of Codeberg" with the newly added clarification that they may include cryptocurrency projects for example. Moderation is not very proactive on Codeberg. This terms addition basically gives them clearance to ban a cryptocurrency project that is deemed to harm the site's/community's reputation by for example being a scammy shitcoin.
> with the newly added clarification that they may include cryptocurrency projects for example.
Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').
While codeberg can do as they please, I'm worried about the walled gardens we're creating all over the place. Be it non-exclusive open source projects (hi gitea) because it's a meeting point for a subset of extremist politics or services like this (not even talking about x, fediverse, etc. etc.). The open and free web seems dead, it's fragmented into oblivion. I always valued the weird and random exchange of ideas that challenge my own worldviews.
I've just got back from my day, and I see the Codeberg PR has been stormed by new accounts.
Please dont. I posted this here to spark a discussion on HN, not as a license to raid Codeberg. They're at liberty to set their own policies in the same way I'm at liberty to not use their services.
If you want to discuss this and you're not already an account holder at Codeberg, the comments section is right here.
They are not necessarily new accounts, their flag shows this is the first time you engaged with a discussion. You could have had an account for months, and it still flags you as new.
Besides support, the only correct feeling about this "well that sucks, I'll selfhost or open my own source sharing service with different guidelines". I wouldn't have backed this decision - but lots of smaller communities hosting services, backed by different tech, making steering decisions is the right way for the open internet.
I think the real issue is that lots of people somehow got convinced that Codeberg is a somehow better version of GitHub that won't ever be susceptible to the same issues GitHub had, which is mainly too much centralisation and all the risks associated with it.
Codeberg and others setting their own rules (especially if it's done via a community vote and not a decision by some random exec who's just heard a buzzword and now forces everyone to immediately adopt it) is actually a desirable outcome -- given that Forgejo or any other GitLab is open source, so you can (and somebody probably will) create more "hubs". This avoids lock-in by a single "hub" and hopefully will lead to more standartisation and cooperation instead of what we have now with a single largest hub like GitHub.
If Codeberg becomes a place where you cannot just host any of your projects without caring about its politics like you can host on GitHub, GitHub monopoly will continue. This is very unfortunate, and despite I prefer Forgejo web UI to GitHub's web UI, I'll have to stay off codeberg out of concerns they'll wipe my repos in case, for example, they decide any LLM-assisted code is suddenly disallowed on the platform.
It's hard to understand decisions like this from an organization offering an alternative to Github since it goes directly against the network effects that they are supposed to be trying to build. I understand the point of banning a project after it comes out that they've commited crimes, but I hardly want the host of my repo to be the authority deciding whether my project is good or bad before the fact.
Codeberg being transparent about having a political bent - which all projects do even if they claim not to - is fine. Wonderful even.
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
Yeah, I'm not interested in a service that makes their product decisions based on the political hot button issue of the day. Was it only yesterday when they decided to ban "vibecoded" projects? Nobody in comments had a clear idea on what exactly the definition of "vibecoded" is, so half of the discussion was just confusion.
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
fishgoesblub | 18 hours ago
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
sanskritical | 18 hours ago
https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/
Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.
bergie | 18 hours ago
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
datadrivenangel | 18 hours ago
dbmikus | 18 hours ago
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
rakoo | 11 hours ago
jmalicki | 18 hours ago
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
fooqux | 18 hours ago
ivan888 | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
tbrownaw | 18 hours ago
trollbridge | 17 hours ago
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
Tepix | 15 hours ago
trollbridge | 8 hours ago
(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)
tapoxi | 4 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
Sovereign personal infrastructure is amazing. Highly recommended. Dealing with the government's rules and their politics is obnoxious enough. I'm starting to really lose patience with all of these communities.
Heliodex | 18 hours ago
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260723015826/https://codeberg....
Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/
danpalmer | 18 hours ago
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
weakened_malloc | 18 hours ago
hackinthebochs | 18 hours ago
gh02t | 18 hours ago
JumpCrisscross | 18 hours ago
The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.
The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.
danpalmer | 17 hours ago
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
surgical_fire | 10 hours ago
lostmsu | 6 hours ago
thrance | 7 hours ago
mbac32768 | 18 hours ago
hackermanai | 18 hours ago
OtomotO | 18 hours ago
aveao | 11 hours ago
DaSHacka | 17 hours ago
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
LtWorf | 13 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
aveao | 11 hours ago
lostmsu | 6 hours ago
gmerc | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
jjmarr | 18 hours ago
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
Forgeties79 | 18 hours ago
duxup | 17 hours ago
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
Asking people to define that nearly got me kicked out of lobsters.
These people don't want to have to define it. Ironically, they're going to enforce their rules based on vibes. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced.
tbrownaw | 17 hours ago
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
tkel | 16 hours ago
Are you saying you are opposed to this on the grounds that anything could happen in the future? That doesn't really make sense. Yes, anything could happen. Yes, people change. That is true in nearly all contexts.
If you're asking in good faith, you participate in the community democratically and try to influence others. Just like normal.
There was a vote held for this decision, it was 306-154.
0x3f | 14 hours ago
One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.
throwa356262 | 12 hours ago
We have different places with different philosophies. It is okay to be different, otherwise everything would look boringly identical.
Sincerely, A meat lover and a codeberg fan.
0x3f | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
joepie91_ | 9 hours ago
Oxodao | 6 hours ago
StrontiumK9 | 12 hours ago
tkel | 10 hours ago
iamnothere | 7 hours ago
There are also systems that exist between “legally mandated voting” and “whoever shows up”.
You could even set different thresholds based on the importance of the issue! (Decisions like ToS changes would seem to be quite important.)
inigyou | an hour ago
iamnothere | 43 minutes ago
Y-bar | 13 hours ago
I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.
The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.
An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.
Working 40 hours a week is a political number.
Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.
ChocolateGod | 13 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
lostmsu | 6 hours ago
TaLiTr | 4 hours ago
But the GPs comment blamed Mastodon as a whole for allowing the possibility of admin abuse, which isn't substantially different from HN.
andai | 14 hours ago
f_devd | 13 hours ago
stratocumulus0 | 13 hours ago
An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.
inigyou | an hour ago
____mr____ | 13 hours ago
They do not believe this because this is simply not the reality we live in
> Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
They are correct in this view. No matter how "apolitical" platforms like Github and various maintainers of open source projects pretend to be, the reality is that creating, hosting and distributing code is highly political and should be treated as such.
hogwasher | 12 hours ago
And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.
It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
surgical_fire | 10 hours ago
Taking a stance does not mean you adopted an "us vs. them" mentality.
What a bonkers generalization.
veeti | 8 hours ago
EligibleDecoy | 5 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
thinkingemote | 12 hours ago
They are voluntarily choosing to be a publisher. Publishers are responsible for the actions that the users do on their platform.
States are happier with and want more publishers as it's easier to censor, add surveillance and control them than neutral platforms.
The few past times when Cloudfare censored politically was interesting as they quickly made apologies because they want to be seen more as a neutral platform than a service that nation states can control.
It's why modern internet legislation across all parties and across all nations is geared towards changing platforms into publishers.
And it's why the services that we would have seen to be independent and neutral in the past are choosing this new paradigm.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
No such distinction exists. It was a just-so story made up by people trying to push the idea that moderation created a legal liability.
And it's German, anyway. The DMCA doesn't even apply there.
thinkingemote | 11 hours ago
It was ever thus except when we remember.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
vitalyan8184 | 18 hours ago
>Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort
in the current year, that's a massive red flag.
lopatin | 18 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
TZubiri | 15 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
Reddit bans abuse (defined as not uploading an ID photo), is that fine?
andunie | 18 hours ago
lifthrasiir | 18 hours ago
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
firloop | 18 hours ago
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use
Mostly positive HN discussion when this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403780
DaSHacka | 17 hours ago
mbreese | 17 hours ago
Rightly or wrongly, Codeberg had a different feel. For a while it felt like it was trying to be a refuge from Github. But then again, maybe that was projecting something on them that they didn't intend.
iamnothere | 17 hours ago
Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros—Debian’s governance is slow but functional—but it seems to need guardrails around the process. (From what I can tell, an excruciating process is the best guardrail. Glacially slow decision-making means that mobs burn themselves out before they get to voting.)
tkel | 14 hours ago
andai | 14 hours ago
Well I suppose that's also technically true of governments...
dokyun | 13 hours ago
iamnothere | 8 hours ago
Hyper-productive people are often volatile. Putting up with it is a necessary tradeoff, as the systems they produce often fill a niche that nobody else will serve adequately.
dokyun | 2 hours ago
Drew I think is just kind of a dick who has a history of putting his personal crusades before delivering a product people want. I remember a few years back sourcehut being reported as unstable and he went and lashed out at people who were complaining to him about it instead of fixing the issues. And he banned crypto projects cause he doesn't like them, at least Codeberg held it to a vote.
Patrick Volkerding is a pretty stable guy, I think he's the model more BDFLs should strive to be.
iamnothere | 2 hours ago
I think Drew suffers a little from lack of focus. I greatly appreciate his work on Harelang, sway, and aerc for instance, but these are quite far from his Sourcehut work. (I can see how aerc and Sourcehut dovetail with the plaintext email focus, at least.)
zombot | 11 hours ago
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
nailer | 8 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhGrk8dp91M
nailer | 8 hours ago
Klonoar | 4 hours ago
Anecdotally I’ve come across a number of smaller crates in the Rust ecosystem that store their code there. Usually European devs.
JuniperMesos | 18 hours ago
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
MallocVoidstar | 18 hours ago
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
delfinom | 18 hours ago
unethical_ban | 18 hours ago
JuniperMesos | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 25 minutes ago
(KF got banned from Cloudflare, then had a lot of trouble finding an ISP, eventually made their own, and then had trouble finding upstreams. You might wonder what they did that was so bad but not illegal - that's a long story.)
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
elictronic | 17 hours ago
aliasxneo | 15 hours ago
letmevoteplease | 18 hours ago
minimaxir | 18 hours ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
newsomix9xl | 18 hours ago
wewewedxfgdf | 18 hours ago
spacechild1 | 11 hours ago
tapoxi | 18 hours ago
This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.
aveao | 11 hours ago
Making the proposal fit all the nuances would no doubt be a nightmare in an association structure with so many members distributed around the world, we've had 6h+ long meetings for deciding on wording of a controversial policy in our e.V., and that was with everyone involved in the same room.
Codeberg may simply not be the right forge for many projects, which is probably fine, but does leave a gap for a good non-big-tech forge alternative (tangled isn't a good alternative, fwiw).
add-sub-mul-div | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 18 hours ago
tbrownaw | 17 hours ago
Also commercial activity tends to happen when everyone involved in the activity comes out ahead, so placing it as opposed to "net good" is perhaps a bit dubious.
ninjahawk1 | 18 hours ago
Lerc | 18 hours ago
A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.
More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.
jadar | 18 hours ago
trentor | 18 hours ago
Lerc | 18 hours ago
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
comeonbro | 18 hours ago
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
sergiotapia | 18 hours ago
So it's totally fine to poke fun, and totally fine for them to do whatever they want. We aren't part of that community!
trentor | 18 hours ago
alloyed | 18 hours ago
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
iamnothere | 17 hours ago
masafej536 | 17 hours ago
lmz | 16 hours ago
tancop | 12 hours ago
imo the best way to fix is with a hybrid model where consumers pay member fees to get discounts but decision making is down to workers, basically how it was before shareholder supremacy.
surgical_fire | 9 hours ago
The larger body of users who don't want to be bothered are likely welcome, but there are rules to be followed.
They can go elsewhere you know? I mean, it's not like they are paying for anything.
ashton314 | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
juliangmp | 15 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 15 hours ago
Judging by your comment, looks like it's actually led by paying users, or whatever it is that these "members of the e.V." are.
omnimus | 14 hours ago
juliangmp | 14 hours ago
A member is someone that signs up and pays a membership fee (currently that's at least 24€/year, see https://join.codeberg.org/). So yes, the people that pay get to vote. But we're also the ones sending money in to pay for the servers (which is the main source of income for Codeberg), since the e.V. is considered charitable I'm pretty sure this is legally a donation but im not gonna pretend to know things about our tax system.
I get that this sounds strange to people outside of Germany but it's a very common thing here, your local football club is an e.V. for example. It's also not that rare within the foss/software/nerd space, KDE and the CCC are both Vereine as well.
kajman | 16 hours ago
TheChaplain | 15 hours ago
LtWorf | 11 hours ago
teravor | 17 hours ago
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
dizhn | 16 hours ago
LtWorf | 11 hours ago
cush | 15 hours ago
juliangmp | 15 hours ago
vlugorilla | 4 hours ago
aendruk | 3 hours ago
https://join.codeberg.org/
lifthrasiir | 18 hours ago
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
yieldcrv | 18 hours ago
> “ Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”
Github still works, and the crypto ecosystem also has arweave and many others for static assets
ares623 | 18 hours ago
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
qiqitori | 18 hours ago
a34729t | 18 hours ago
fzeroracer | 18 hours ago
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
pibaker | 18 hours ago
bel8 | 18 hours ago
I have small open source projects that I won't move to Codeberg ever now because I don't want to waste any mental energy pondering if I might get banned in the future.
For example I have a stock trading backtracking strategy test tool. Will they ban anything related to fintech in the future because it is deemed evil? I don't want to have to think about that.
Will they ban my crappy game macroing tool to automate some simple repetitive game actions because it is considered cheating or against some game ToS? I don't care and I don't want to have to care about a possible ban. It's a glorified auto clicker to prevent RSI health issues ffs.
squigz | 17 hours ago
hparadiz | 15 hours ago
tkel | 14 hours ago
hparadiz | 14 hours ago
Germans democratically elected Hitler. A vote by less than 500 randoms means less than nothing.
tkel | 14 hours ago
This is such a tired trope and myth from people who haven't studied history
Also, you're being comically absurd. You're literally comparing codeberg to Nazi Germany? lol
inigyou | 11 hours ago
I don't see what it has to do with Codeberg though.
sneak | 17 hours ago
pibaker | 16 hours ago
I'll be more sympathetic to your view if similar rules are imposed by GitHub, given its network effect and many software ecosystems' dependency on GitHub on an infrastructural level. But codeberg is not that.
inigyou | 26 minutes ago
elictronic | 17 hours ago
witx | 13 hours ago
pibaker | 13 hours ago
witx | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 18 hours ago
avaer | 18 hours ago
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
inigyou | 18 hours ago
avaer | 18 hours ago
squigz | 17 hours ago
Oh, honey...
inigyou | 13 hours ago
q8zd3 | 18 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
q8zd3 | 10 hours ago
inigyou | 7 hours ago
ChrisArchitect | 18 hours ago
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
shikck200 | 18 hours ago
cute_boi | 18 hours ago
DaSHacka | 17 hours ago
Well, sounds like it is a successful technology.
hparadiz | 15 hours ago
Cider9986 | 16 hours ago
shikck200 | 14 hours ago
Would you be happy to send your kids to a school that no one knows whos the owner, who operates it and if there is any kind of hazards and/or insurance/maintenance? Lets not even talk about how and what the teachers get paid, as its all fully private.
fwn | 10 hours ago
Someone arguing for the ability to pay someone without surveillance does not argue for a world where nobody knows each other anymore. That would be awful, of course.
Cider9986 | 4 hours ago
Yes. Monero is the equivalent of spending cash online. Any service that accepts monero still has order numbers to deliver the product. Or requires an address if it must be shipped.
It's about minimizing unnecessary data.
shikck200 | 14 hours ago
spaceman_2020 | 18 hours ago
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
rvz | 17 hours ago
As it stands, AI has already surpassed the energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, and is also burning the entire planet [0]. It is only going up due to the data center build out. [1][2]
The cryptocurrency industry already found ways to migrate off of PoW to Proof-of-Stake so there exists an efficient alternative to reduce emissions.
AI still does not and the hard requirement is to build more data centers to keep up with the scale, hence higher token prices, energy prices, electronics and water.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
[1] https://ai2027-tracker.com/predictions/ai-power-consumption/
[2] https://www.aon.com/en/insights/articles/securing-power-glob...
hackinthebochs | 18 hours ago
loeg | 18 hours ago
Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.
iamnothere | 18 hours ago
Once you open the door, it’s going to be really difficult to resist political pressure in other areas. The mob is easily swayed against new targets.
loeg | 17 hours ago
iamnothere | 17 hours ago
Or if you think they should, should they also provide guarantees to projects that the rules will not be suddenly changed, disrupting the project and community?
If not, and you’re a developer, why would you want to host there?
loeg | 7 hours ago
shikck200 | 14 hours ago
> Software that gets used to leak state secrets?
Thats not really a "thing". If someone uploads something of the sorts, it probably going to be taken down. VPNs follow the same rules as P2P/E2EE, and has nothing to do with crypto.
Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
iamnothere | 8 hours ago
Chat Control 2.0? Public pressure campaigns against encryption? The mob decides that it’s “fascist” to prevent snooping?
> Thats not really a "thing".
WikiLeaks and SecureDrop would disagree.
> Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Yes, and I’m saying that this is a bad thing. Obviously there may be limited means to contest legal actions (outside of decentralization), but GitHub has been iffy regarding ToS applications in the past.
dbmikus | 18 hours ago
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
overfeed | 16 hours ago
overfeed | 13 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
pamcake | 11 hours ago
Codeberg has 0 paying customers. It is a non-profit providing services for free and not a business.
Membership in the non-profit requires fee paid by EU bank transfer and gives voting rights on questions like this but is separate accounting from use of the free sevices.
All this is explained front-and center or codeberg.org.
LtWorf | 10 hours ago
jjmarr | 18 hours ago
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
zarzavat | 17 hours ago
birksherty | 17 hours ago
zarzavat | 17 hours ago
If they want to ban scammers then why don't they just ban scammers instead of a blanket policy that bans legitimate projects as well?
TaLiTr | 47 minutes ago
fzeroracer | 17 hours ago
tbrownaw | 17 hours ago
Are they though? I see "We are more than just Git hosting: Our community is ..." right in the highlight box on their landing page.
ShinyLeftPad | 16 hours ago
whateveracct | 15 hours ago
hparadiz | 15 hours ago
pibaker | 13 hours ago
zelias | 8 hours ago
tkel | 14 hours ago
acedTrex | 8 hours ago
They are not trying to run an inclusive service.
p-e-w | 17 hours ago
andor | 14 hours ago
Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
p-e-w | 13 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
p-e-w | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 10 hours ago
joepie91_ | 9 hours ago
fishgoesblub | 8 hours ago
Very similar things can be said about VPNs. Seeing only the bad to justify banning an entire category is terrible.
inigyou | 27 minutes ago
And if your answer is "because they break the law" then I assume you also hate Martin Luther King?
squigz | 9 hours ago
newsomix9xl | 18 hours ago
Cryptoberg or whatever.
innocent_name | 18 hours ago
cmrdporcupine | 18 hours ago
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
cmrdporcupine | 9 hours ago
https://scholar.social/@silvermoon82@wandering.shop/11696402... "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Both those threads have other examples, and there are plenty more other threads like them. It has the smell of a smug in group that allows no dissent.
I am also 80% certain there were comments on the PR (https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253) along similar lines that were removed but I have no backups or screenshots to backup that accusation.
pamcake | 10 hours ago
Self-hosting classic forge is great but does require domain name and infra with uptime. These p2p solutions are more like bittorrent where you can clone as long as someone is seeding and git already has commit signature as building block for trust.
cmrdporcupine | 9 hours ago
I was already hosting my own CI, I never used Codeberg's because I was trying to be responsible with their resources because I liked [past tense] them. Getting back on GH actually means I don't have to do that anymore, I will enjoy leaching from Microsoft.
I do have my own self-hosted Gerrit I use for other somewhat more private things. But self-hosting has its own hassles (backups, security, etc).
And in fact one of those other things is in fact my own project to make a "forge" type thing. Vaguely similar to what Dorsey announced the other day (integrated git, chat, code review, code browsing, llm agent interaction, etc into one dynamic r) but I started on it quite some time ago, it's built on my own bespoke runtime, and it's generally more ambitious ... but also I'm not a techbro billionaire so I don't have the resources to finish it right now and I have to work on other projects.
rvz | 18 hours ago
gnabgib | 18 hours ago
rvz | 17 hours ago
If you are after a sustainable and stable code repository to host your projects then Codeberg disqualified themselves. It goes down regularly as much as GitHub and loses to GitHub on discovery.
Now, you can potentially lose your entire account and projects by posting a repo that can have AI with auto-complete.
If Linus Torvalds (pro-AI) published his scuba-diving software [0] there, which there is a CLAUDE.md file in the repository, it would get banned.
[0] https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface
notabotiswear | 16 hours ago
I don’t want nor am I interested in arguing whether “handcrafted” is good or bad, just positing that some people would prefer it. May not be great for [i]growth[/i], but it’s not like Codeberg is a service by a megacorp aiming to corner the market (one of the reasons why everything is regressing to mediocre slop these days, but I digress).
That Torvalds plays for the other team is irrelevant. But if we’re mentioning him, one should recall that it was ol’ swears-a-lot himself who said “fork it or just walk away” on a similar topic.
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
rvz | 12 minutes ago
Since you studied the entire policy, what is the methodology in determining a project that uses generative AI-tools or not that covers the ban? What does "mostly" mean here? Is there a percentage defined? Or did they look at sourcehut's Anti-AI policy and start from there?
This is actually a good example since people can just fork existing "human made" software, (Free software permits you to do that) and run agents on it and hide the "slop" commits to circumvent that policy. Maybe someone would like in Rust and use an agent to do that. Or continue it as is but just adding new features quickly.
> subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
...for now and it will eventually have more gen AI code anyway.
subsurface already has generative AI tools committing to the code base and the presence of the CLAUDE.md guarantees that. The same can be said with Vim which has an AGENTS.md file.
zx8080 | 18 hours ago
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
jdw64 | 18 hours ago
Honestly, I think this measure actually gives Codeberg a competitive edge in terms of code quality.
I think we're now seeing a pattern where, under a 'free' large market, regulations are being used to create unique market identities. That's my take—it depends on what you regulate, which determines the market's character.
Personally, I've noticed that when Codeberg announced regulations around AI code, most of the comments cheered. But when the same people talk about cryptocurrency regulations, they get angry. It seems like people just want to regulate what they don't like, not what they do.
I won't use Codeberg myself, but I think this policy is reasonable. I've decided that what you regulate defines your market's identity.
jdormit | 18 hours ago
There are some levels of censorship that make sense for a code forge - “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”, etc. But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software sends the message that this isn’t a safe place to host any of your repositories. If the moral landscape shifts in the future, how can you be sure your project won’t be next on the chopping block?
What a terrible precedent to set.
raincole | 17 hours ago
birksherty | 17 hours ago
duxup | 17 hours ago
tbrownaw | 17 hours ago
tehbeard | 14 hours ago
* - the code. Just the code. only the code. Nothing but the code. You don't need the issues, the roadmap, the ACL of which human can do what, the API access keys for third parties, the artifact repos. Just. The. Code.
Somewhat arsey in my tone? Yeah. But having done two large scale (100+ repos) forge migrations of our company's client projects (SVN -> github, then later on github -> bitbucket) and seeing people completely ignore the metadata surrounding the code that isn't as easy to "just push" anywhere, somewhat justified.
Marsymars | 15 hours ago
kurante | 17 hours ago
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
hbbio | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
krapp | 17 hours ago
Codeberg isn't competing against Github for market share, it serves a specific demographic with a specific ideology. Anyone is welcome to use any other host they want for their crypto and AI projects, with whatever policies align with their preferences. Or make your own with blackjack and hookers.
There shouldn't even be "default choices" or "huge network effects" in FOSS anyway. That's just another form of centralization.
kurante | 17 hours ago
I agree that this is probably going to cause some fragmentation, but I'm not convinced that it will do so in a meaningful matter or at the scale at which it is problematic to the free and open source ecosystem.
For what it's worth, Forgejo is working on federation[1], which might address your networking effect concerns?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2026-05-monthly-report/#federation
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
There are going to be many splits. Cryptocurrencies. Vibecoding. Whatever else offends them.
Whether it will be "significant" or not, remains to be seen. I won't be sticking around to witness it.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
p-e-w | 17 hours ago
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
rvz | 17 hours ago
So far it is now (unofficially) The hoster of Human-made™ non-crypto™ Free Software so far it is fully legal under the jurisdiction or country it resides in (Germany).
hparadiz | 16 hours ago
kurante | 16 hours ago
Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them
What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].
Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... [2]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/compare/17bdb39b0c1ecd0e42...
p-e-w | 16 hours ago
Absolutely. And it would be even better if the moderators each wrote a short summary that’s an honest attempt to describe what their individual ideologies are.
I respect institutions that clearly state their biases much more than those that pretend they have none.
kurante | 14 hours ago
We should also make sure people read all the blurbs before they join a website. Maybe we should call it the Terms of Service? ;)
Despite most websites having nothing but legalese in there, Codeberg's is pretty short and human readable by comparison. I know most people have been desensitized to it, but I haven't heard of any better way of coveying them at an institutional level.
p-e-w | 13 hours ago
When I join a community, I would like to be able to predict whether tomorrow, they might ban Chinese projects, or projects written in Lisp, or projects that only run on Windows.
This doesn’t follow from the ToS, it follows from what the platform’s values are. Codeberg does publicly state its claimed values, but they don’t imply these new bans.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
colordrops | 13 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
cush | 15 hours ago
avaer | 14 hours ago
The least they could do as a nonprofit is make users aware that a core tenet of the service is to promote/ban whatever content the community voting decides any given day, and hopefully what ideology they are following.
Otherwise any serious person would to well to stay away from Codeberg; you don't know if your project will be in the community's sights in the next vote.
selfhoster1312 | 13 hours ago
Unless your project is very sketchy to begin with, you have nothing to fear. I would understand this kind of fear if we talked about a company whose CEO dictates directions every month or so. But this is a non-profit with sane individuals and debates.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
cush | an hour ago
Imagine for a second if that were actually the case. Most rules are determined by physics, science, data, or something tangible. Food safety, aviation, electrical codes, even sports rules are based on math and statistics.
omnimus | 14 hours ago
It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.
colordrops | 15 hours ago
kleene_op | 14 hours ago
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
selfhoster1312 | 13 hours ago
There's nothing surprising, new, or shocking about codeberg banning cryptocurrency projects. This is the logical conclusion of them being a non-profit acting for the good of humanity and not for the crypto grifters.
Barrin92 | 13 hours ago
conartist6 | 17 hours ago
mbreese | 17 hours ago
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
axus | 15 hours ago
Their argument was economic, an economic solution would be good:
"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects"
Ultimately, democracy is a respectable form of government and the group is free to change their mind later.
rtpg | 14 hours ago
here lies the fundamental misunderstanding by many people in this thread.
Is the objective of Codeberg to host as many projects as possible on its own server? I do not believe so!
The question then becomes "what is Codeberg's objectives?"
It's not to become the world's largest code forge instance! It's to build a set of FOSS tools for FOSS software development. Look at [0], for example, which lists alternatives.
But perhaps most importantly, the FOSS tooling can be self hosted, right? There's still a notion of freedom there.
[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
throw49404040 | 14 hours ago
I have bunch of projects and sites there for a year+, most of them are llm generated.
What is a grace period for existing projects to move? What are criteria for deciding what is "vibe coded"? If i get banned, is the repo just deleted, or made readonly...
Codeberg had outage for last 5 days, where some repos could not be commited into. I expected post mortem analysis, not this debate!
inigyou | 11 hours ago
Immediate. They can be deleted tomorrow.
> What are criteria
Common sense
> Is the repo just deleted
Probably. What would be the point of archiving (what they perceive as) garbage?
joepie91_ | 9 hours ago
echelon | 17 hours ago
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
simonw | 16 hours ago
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion.
Where terms and conditions are concerned I really do value "easy answers".
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
what | 15 hours ago
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
hparadiz | 15 hours ago
DANmode | 15 hours ago
squigz | 15 hours ago
hparadiz | 15 hours ago
squigz | 15 hours ago
drdaeman | 14 hours ago
PeterStuer | 13 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 15 hours ago
close04 | 14 hours ago
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Does this change your view of HN? Of Codeberg? Of vibe enforced rules?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
close04 | 8 hours ago
HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.
Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?
ceres | 14 hours ago
fragmede | 14 hours ago
close04 | 8 hours ago
And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.
andai | 14 hours ago
holgerschurig | 13 hours ago
Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.
Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.
But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.
And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.
There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.
matheusmoreira | 12 hours ago
There's no way for anyone reading their rules to know if their projects are slop. It's full of "mostly" and "significantly". That's virtually guaranteed to boil down to "we don't like it".
So "they didn't know how to define it" is about the most charitable interpretation I can muster. Alternative interpretations, such as "the vagueness is a feature since it enables selective enforcement", are also available, and they only get more and more uncharitable.
> Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable.
Had they wanted to define it, they would have done so.
> Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I have insight into their actions, and I'm perfectly capable of inferring context and motives from them.
> I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, it is desirable that things be precisely defined so that people can know where they stand. Depending on the exact definition, I may or may not be welcome. Therefore I'm not going back there without a precise definition.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
TaLiTr | 32 minutes ago
This is more like asking someone colorblind which shade of red the image is closer to.
inigyou | 21 minutes ago
what | 15 hours ago
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
mutkach | 13 hours ago
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
simonw | 5 hours ago
The ToS change grammar could do with tightening up as well.
kajman | 16 hours ago
> Side projects and experiments with little resource usage > Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated
I really don't want to join a commons where something I make might be "tolerated in practice" based on a given moderator's vibe. Which I suppose is the message I was meant to receive from the issue that passed the vote.
imtringued | 14 hours ago
Wow so they banned literally everything?
inigyou | 11 hours ago
whateveracct | 15 hours ago
not_your_vase | 13 hours ago
I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
timmmmmmay | 5 hours ago
isodev | 17 hours ago
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
gslepak | 17 hours ago
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
super256 | 17 hours ago
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh
comeonbro | 17 hours ago
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
inigyou | 11 hours ago
holgerschurig | 15 hours ago
Except that here is no censorship to be seen.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
TZubiri | 15 hours ago
But I tried clicking on the link cited in the OP that would explain this ( https://forum.codeberg.org/d/82-taking-a-stance-against-cryp... ) and it got 404.
And getting a 404 on a host that's supposed to host code, now that is completely unacceptable and makes you want to stay far away indeed.
selfhoster1312 | 13 hours ago
TZubiri | 3 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
404, oh no! Better never use github!
mfru | 14 hours ago
arkh | 14 hours ago
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
glerk | 18 hours ago
krapp | 18 hours ago
glerk | 17 hours ago
I’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
gverrilla | 17 hours ago
krapp | 7 hours ago
natas | 17 hours ago
tkel | 15 hours ago
FabCH | 15 hours ago
It’s not a fallacy if it actually happened.
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
FabCH | 9 hours ago
Because the ToS helpfully doesn’t explain.
Does LLM autocomplete break the ToS? What about pre-LLM autocomplete? What about code written by LLM but reviewed by humans?
Also, the spirit of the community is clear, given the preamble and the provided moral basis for the decision: they don’t want any LLM usage at all.
joegibbs | 14 hours ago
bringfiregames | 17 hours ago
mostlyRice | 17 hours ago
protocolture | 17 hours ago
adithyassekhar | 17 hours ago
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
conartist6 | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
conartist6 | 17 hours ago
To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value
iamnothere | 17 hours ago
If Codeberg wants to put a flag up to draw in every programmer with a personality disorder, well that may be their right, but it’s not a good idea.
stackghost | 13 hours ago
Welcome to society. There is no such thing as a meritocracy.
iamnothere | 8 hours ago
conartist6 | 6 hours ago
stackghost | 4 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
iamnothere | 7 hours ago
And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.
But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.
inigyou | 6 hours ago
iamnothere | 6 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
Yes, the effect is it will become a toxic community where your project can be summarily judged and instantly dismissed as slop because there's an AGENTS.md file in the repository or LLM attribution in the commit messages.
conartist6 | 15 hours ago
davkan | 14 hours ago
Right or wrong many users are utterly uninterested in said content and wish that their existing communities could continue as they did prior to the onslaught. Naturally, some communities will decide to attempt to moderate in such a way that supports those users desires. As with most necessary moderation of online communities there will be gray areas and judgement calls and drama and abuse. There really isn’t an alternative.
Barrin92 | 13 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 13 hours ago
You can find it on lobsters though, where I did post the full reply along with the prompt in response to the exact same cop out. To this day, it's still the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire 300+ comment thread I posted it in. Not bad for a clanker, huh?
conartist6 | 9 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 3 hours ago
yaemiko | 4 hours ago
andrewflnr | 17 hours ago
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
nilshauk | 17 hours ago
conartist6 | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 17 hours ago
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
conartist6 | 17 hours ago
matheusmoreira | 16 hours ago
conartist6 | 16 hours ago
whilenot-dev | 14 hours ago
[0]: https://lobste.rs/~matheusmoreira
matheusmoreira | 14 hours ago
Since then I've been mostly participating on veqq's lobster interview threads. My highest posting volume was in my own interview thread. The interview itself took place before all of these unfortunate events. Veqq is a really nice person, one of a select few who told me they were sad to see me go, even though we have different viewpoints on AI.
> how is soft quitting war?
Culture war, I suppose.
archagon | 13 hours ago
Lobsters will probably be fine.
matheusmoreira | 13 hours ago
fodkodrasz | 15 hours ago
archagon | 13 hours ago
fodkodrasz | 57 minutes ago
I clearly remember why my account with lots of photos was deleted from mastodon.social without warning: There was a poll "Have you donated to the Antifa", two options: no / I'm a fascist. I replied there is some more nuance to the topic, also in some jurisdictions the organization is listed as a terrorist organization, and as such it is illegal to do so, link to an example (us in those days, it was in the news). Well, apart from some nice photos nothing of value was lost, also it was a great lesson why you need to self-host and not rely on "self-moderating communities" or megacorps...
Some taboo of that "community"... much like free healthcare or unionization or illegal migration is slave labour (and class warfare against the working class, including legal migrants and legal guest-workforce) in disguise (was banned from a VC funded SV echo-chamber for this opinion) are taboos of this "community".
Guess I'm an extremist... or just Eastern-European.
jrflowers | 17 hours ago
It is like “I’m not taking anything from that food bank since they clarified that they won’t be accepting or doling out rat meat” like ok buddy, you do you
aliasxneo | 16 hours ago
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
tkel | 15 hours ago
selfhoster1312 | 13 hours ago
Communitivity | 16 hours ago
omnimus | 14 hours ago
iepathos | 16 hours ago
LtWorf | 11 hours ago
Marha01 | 16 hours ago
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
Are you sure you don't feel insulted and threatened because you're yourself a sloperator, so it feels personal to have others criticize your practices from a moral standpoint? (i don't know, i haven't researched your profile)
skippyfish | 15 hours ago
If you're not interested in stuff like that when your company is doing it, but are up in arms about some other platform deciding that they don't like crypto, I think you should look in the mirror. Their reasoning is probably the same: they don't like it and don't want to put up with the task of sensibly policing the category.
Panzerschrek | 15 hours ago
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
biznickman | 15 hours ago
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
vlugorilla | 15 hours ago
FireInsight | 12 hours ago
jaredcwhite | 15 hours ago
I'm not surprised many here are upset. Many here don't seem to understand the outrageous harms that a totally out-of-control tech industry has been foisting upon the planet. It's time to take a stand for a better path forward.
tancop | 11 hours ago
all the harms come from for-profit companies that use crypto as a cover, like polymarket or stake. the contracts are on chain and might be open licensed but one company controls everything in practice with admin rights. and they make it hard to access directly without going through the proprietary frontend hosted on their servers.
the only ones who would ever want to host their code on codeberg are real community projects, because the corpos are all happy with github.
wolvesechoes | 15 hours ago
kamikazechaser | 15 hours ago
This incident coupled with the Forgejo one (In which they twisted the whole story and made Gitea look like the biggest villain in FOSS when in fact they orchestrated the whole drama by submitting a controversial PR that many people don't know about) made me quit and keep away from their hosting.
Borgz | 14 hours ago
globular-toast | 14 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
akimbostrawman | 5 hours ago
_nhh | 14 hours ago
selfhoster1312 | 13 hours ago
1. that LLMs actually improve project quality, which may be true for projects with very clear style guides and test suites (eg. the linux kernel) but may also be false for 99% of projects (are the LLM tests testing good behavior or just random stuff?)
2. that codeberg's orientation is to host code for private businesses (it's a non-profit in which businesses may take part, but that's definitely not the target audience)
abc42 | 14 hours ago
But this (and especially the AI ban) is a big red flag and I'm steering clear from Codeberg.
PeterStuer | 14 hours ago
selfhoster1312 | 12 hours ago
If you don't see the politics behind economic actors, i would recommend taking a closer look.
tkel | 14 hours ago
KronisLV | 14 hours ago
Then again, Codeberg as a project can do whatever they want. I'm just happy that anyone can host Gitea, Gogs, GitBucket or GitLab or whatever they wnat. For my personal stuff Gitea works really nice with Woodpecker CI.
I'm sure many other hosted platforms don't have such stringent rules, though.
arjie | 13 hours ago
FireInsight | 12 hours ago
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
sandebert | 13 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
bArray | 13 hours ago
> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?
It looks like we need more alternatives...
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184
bramhaag | 12 hours ago
No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
spacechild1 | 12 hours ago
bArray | 10 hours ago
The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
28304283409234 | 12 hours ago
bravetraveler | 11 hours ago
What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
hogwasher | 12 hours ago
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
bko | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
tarpitt | 10 hours ago
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
inigyou | 7 hours ago
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
inigyou | an hour ago
1shooner | 5 hours ago
Then you would have been a supporting member, and had the opportunity to vote on this decision.
Timon3 | 3 hours ago
This isn't very cool of you.
KptMarchewa | 9 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
mlrtime | 10 hours ago
Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.
Forgeties79 | 7 hours ago
Oxodao | 6 hours ago
jacooper | 30 minutes ago
ModernMech | 3 hours ago
jacooper | 31 minutes ago
Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter. It just doesn't matter.
zombot | 11 hours ago
surgical_fire | 10 hours ago
Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.
But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.
To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
sunshine-o | 9 hours ago
Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
curiousObject | 6 hours ago
What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
tripzilch | 5 hours ago
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
dlubarov | an hour ago
- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).
- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.
- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."
- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
sunshine-o | 3 hours ago
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/
NotGMan | 8 hours ago
No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
NetOpWibby | 7 hours ago
Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”
EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
selfmodruntime | 6 hours ago
tripzilch | 4 hours ago
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
KetoManx64 | 4 hours ago
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
allarm | 3 hours ago
Which is a waste of energy.
KetoManx64 | 3 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
qwm | 2 hours ago
maxdo | 13 hours ago
You think US is in culture war. But it’s not even comparable .
You have all spectrum in fight : ultra right , ultra left, ultra green , traitors to China , to Russia : Orban , Fico. Some of them just corrupted to worst African dictators level : kidnap bank people with money in the middle of the road .
On top of that their politics is multi layered . People with similar goals fight each other on EU / local level etc .
You project can always appear on the crossroad of such fight or they simply kidnap you and take you money
llama123 | 13 hours ago
On the one hand its there site so they can do what they want and tbh its pretty easy to self host your own git server nowdays (which i do) however the issue i do have with this and really its a wider issue i have with the industry as whole:
I feel like we focus way to much ideology's and moral grandstanding which we then insert that into tech projects so seeing stuff like this makes we want to avoid using this site with a 10 foot pole. Can we just focus on tech not some moral grandstanding about politics, crypto blah blah but i guess thats too hard of a thing to ask or something
FireInsight | 13 hours ago
The entire point of Forgejo, the git forge that Codeberg runs on as well, is that you can run your own very easily. I've stopped having private repos on Github completely in favor of my own Forgejo instance, and it's way smoother and nicer. Codeberg was never meant for private repos, but if I get around to starting a new floss project that I want to put out there, Codeberg would be a great option!
And sure, right now there is no cross-forge collaboration, so you need to have multiple accounts. But forge federation is planned, eventually you should be able to contribute to your friend's project from your instance. If you don't wanna wait, go look at https://tangled.org/ or something.
RamblingCTO | 12 hours ago
aveao | 11 hours ago
RamblingCTO | 8 hours ago
acedTrex | 8 hours ago
inigyou | an hour ago
bcye | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
FireInsight | 6 hours ago
nailer | 5 hours ago
nailer | 5 hours ago
Assuming that people that use blockchains are not principled is similar to assuming that people that use arrays are not principled.
Maybe more ridiculous, as you're supporting banks, card companies, and money transfer providers taking 1-6% of everyone's transactions.
FireInsight | 3 hours ago
nailer | 3 hours ago
Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').
RamblingCTO | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
RamblingCTO | 8 hours ago
inigyou | 7 hours ago
RamblingCTO | 7 hours ago
[OP] intunderflow | 12 hours ago
Please dont. I posted this here to spark a discussion on HN, not as a license to raid Codeberg. They're at liberty to set their own policies in the same way I'm at liberty to not use their services.
If you want to discuss this and you're not already an account holder at Codeberg, the comments section is right here.
StrontiumK9 | 12 hours ago
[OP] intunderflow | 11 hours ago
poisonborz | 12 hours ago
egorfine | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
reassess_blind | 12 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
nasretdinov | 11 hours ago
Codeberg and others setting their own rules (especially if it's done via a community vote and not a decision by some random exec who's just heard a buzzword and now forces everyone to immediately adopt it) is actually a desirable outcome -- given that Forgejo or any other GitLab is open source, so you can (and somebody probably will) create more "hubs". This avoids lock-in by a single "hub" and hopefully will lead to more standartisation and cooperation instead of what we have now with a single largest hub like GitHub.
Retr0id | 11 hours ago
inigyou | 11 hours ago
fragmede | 11 hours ago
VortexLain | 11 hours ago
pluc | 10 hours ago
jimbo_joe | 9 hours ago
sirnicolaz | 8 hours ago
il-b | 8 hours ago
jMyles | 8 hours ago
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
rwz | 7 hours ago
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
qwm | 2 hours ago
toilet | 18 minutes ago