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?
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.
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.
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.
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).
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 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.
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...
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Watching you succumb to indoctrination in real time. No, not everything is political, not anymore than 'everything is natural' or 'everything is power' or 'everything is [anything].'
You can certainly look at all things through whatever singular lens you would like, and certainly all things may ultimately have some aspect of any single facet, but to concede some totalistic view of the world is lazy.
Just because most of everything has a political angle/facet does not mean it defines my life as much as it seem to do to you. It just serves to help me articulate my choices in life.
I would like to know how taking an active moral stand as Codeberg is doing is lazy. Especially when put in relation to armchair analysis on social media.
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'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.
Pluralism is when strangers are forced to host my code for free. The idea of somebody else putting their time and money into something and then not giving it to me is philosophically worrisome
The whole "codeberg is political" is the scary bit. Whose politics? How is it decided by members what exact politics to represent? Do some members have undue influence on exerting their particular politics?
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
No, there's a big difference between "net effects are not guaranteed to be perfectly neutral" and "I am going to intentionally put my thumb on the scale".
The position that everything is political so therefore opinions are mandatory intentionally conflates these things.
My issue with this is not that codeberg and its members want to uphold a certain set of political beliefs. Any private organization is free to do that. It's that they haven't defined the rule that's supposed to encode those beliefs.
As written, the rule is a non-exhaustive example of "content that harms codeberg's reputation". Someone asked in the pr whether "cryptocurrency-related" is defined anywhere and it merged without an answer. The responses to wording concerns was essentially they will figure it out later. Moves like this don't fill me with confidence.
Real-world lines are blurry. If you try to define a bright line, someone finds a loophole. Like the other thread (about codeberg banning vibecoded projects) had arguments about whether a project with 49.999% generated code would count. Which is based on a category error - things just don't work that way.
You're still not understanding the point. It's not about an organization being "private" or "public" (what does "private" even mean?). Everything is political. When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political, obscuring/obfuscating their actual underlying politics, and everything else is pushed outside of it. It is an attempt to create strict boundaries around the limits of discussion and action, which is itself a political act!
>When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political
What are you talking about? Whether something is allowed to be challenged has nothing to do with whether it's political. Actually, what even is not allowed to be challenged? I struggle to come up with a single example.
Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd. There is always an underlying politics, even if it has been normalized or obfuscated, repressed or unexamined. Reread my above comment.
You didn't answer my question about what is not allowed to be challenged.
>Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd.
I don't understand what you're saying. You switched tracked halfway through the thought from talking about communities that distinguish between things that are or aren't political to rejection of taking political stances.
What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on political issues. This is not merely not absurd, but pretty much necessary for any organization that doesn't have ideological goals and doesn't want to foster internal factions.
Like the sibling comment said, just banning cryptocurrency might be political or it might not, depending on the reason for it. Rejecting reasons such as "crypto bad" is a tenable position if an organization seeks to maintain a neutral stance.
Every organization has ideological goals. That's what I'm getting at. Sometimes they are unable to recognize it because it's been normalized. What you define as "neutral" is not actually neutral. Such statements are themselves attempts at controlling what is normal/acceptable. The terms of acceptable discussion is context-dependent, but trying to set them at "politics" is contradictory, as I've explained.
Is the set of acceptable uses for shared infrastructure not a political question? What's different between mining crypto on a free CI server, letting my cows eat all the grass at the park, or dumping industrial waste into the river?
No I understand that. But the point I am making is saying that is much stronger than saying "our policy says we won't host crypto projects going forward". The latter is fine, any service provider can set terms as they fit within the law. But if you claim you are highly political, you must invite further questions into it.
How does Codeberg handle the diverse mix of politics within it and manage its influences? If we give the organization a character by calling it political, we create an obligation to explain further.
Overall, again I feel this is a self-own to project idealogue this hard since you flavor it in a specific way that is not inclusive.
No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
The notion that "everything is political" is an indicator that someone has an extremely toxic relationship with politics. Basically you're projecting your unhealthy level of political engagement onto everyone else, and insisting that we all have that manner of thinking (but are just denying it to score political points). Well that isn't true, and for your own sake I encourage you to stop that. You'll be much happier when you stop making life about politics.
> No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What do you eat and what do you refuse to eat? Which restaurants would you go to or not? Which companies do you buy from and why/why not?
Who do you meet with and who do you avoid? What do you talk about and which topics do you avoid?
Where is your cocoa grown, which brand do you buy and who ends up making money on your purchase?
Even if you reduce it to that, you still endorse (or at least accept) the side effects of the production of what you eat.
If you eat meat, you are okay with the effects it has on climate change, and that’s political. If you do the opposite and don’t eat meat, that’s also political.
If you consume food from non-organic agriculture, you are okay with species extinction, especially insects.
If you buy the cheapest foods, you are okay with the working conditions and low pay necessary to reach the price. If you buy a more expensive option, who in the value chain benefits from the increased price and who doesn’t?
Almost everything that you do is political in some way.
That's disregarding that the people in power routinely make it as difficult as possible to have a choice. If you buy the cheapest foods, maybe it's because you want to eat and pay rent, and spending any more than that would render you homeless. Becoming homeless will not save the poor in another country, even if your purchases to avoid becoming homeless would have contributed a vanishingly tiny, indirect amount to their plight.
I agree that everything is political, and it's good to make choices as ethically as you can, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to be perfect. You can't even know about all the problems without studying them like a full time job. Ain't got time for that. Gotta eat.
The "agonize over every purchase and vote with your dollar" paradigm gives the most votes to billionaires.
Should people think about ethics when buying stuff: yes.
Does failing to recycle a bottle properly, or buying a cheap chocolate bar that may have involved underpaid or even slave labor somewhere in its supply chain, mean someone is evil? Nope.
I wish people would spend less time agonizing or moralizing over what individuals do (even though an individual is easier to influence quickly) and more time going after the broken systems, stupid laws, and malignant CEOs that actually lie at the root of the problems.
So I am very pedantic here, but yes it "can" be seen as political. You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
I understand "everything is political" more in a sense that we as a society have the burden to shape our own rules, and saying "I only live in the society, but ignore the burden of making rules" is not really possible. In that case you actively decide to let someone else decide for you.
>You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
How is that political? It's just a decision based on competing priorities. By this interpretation an animal's decision to either sleep or eat is also political.
What food do you eat, and where do you eat it? How much does it cost? Culturally, where does it come from? Who works the kitchens? Who cleans the place?
> When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political.
Where do you hang out? Who else goes there? Who even are your friends?
> When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What book are you reading? Does the country you live produce the cocoa you are drinking? Do you know where it comes from?
Everything is political to an extent, even the reason we have this discussion in English when English is not my native language.
I am not saying you have to think about those things all the time; that would be exhausting. But ignoring it and pretend everything is separated into its own nice little happy vacuum is too naive.
I don't understand how the two are related, though. Voting yearly as a community does not make things "political" if the issues are not politically challenged themselves. For example, if a group of people get together and decide "hey we want to watch 10 movies this year" that in itself is not a political action. It's a governance action. But if they say, "Hey, let's watch these 10 movies but not watch 1 because we all think it is wrong to capitalize on bananas," that is a political action. In the first one, your individual politics do not matter for consensus but in the second one, it does and as a whole you need to take a stance on a subjective political matter as an organization. And if you take a stance as an organization, you must also accept the consequences of not being impartial which they don't seem to do. "It is political but the details of how/why/what votes are decided, how we think of politics, how it influences our worldwide, our basic ethical code etc are all unknown. BUT IT IS POLITICAL so buzz off." is not a good stance in my opinion, especially for a version control tool.
"So buzz off" (whether a direcy quote or not) seems like a sign they accept the consequence of some people buzzing off.
If they didn't do this, they'd have to accept the consequences of those people not buzzing off, or potentially a different segment of people buzzing off.
Doing nothing isn't an apolitical option either. That's a choice too.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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".
> 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).
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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
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 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.
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
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?
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
Personally this makes me glad I moved to Tangled rather than Codeberg. I don't know how this will be enforced, but I'd be scared of similar things happening in the future to something I'm working on and all the strife that could come with the sudden removal.
For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.
Makes me wonder if all non memory safe code will be on the chopping block in the next 5 years. Will they find it morally justifiable to "protect" people from evil unsafe languages?
> what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions
Wow hold your horses. It's one thing to ban an individual and their projects. It's another thing entirely to ban an entire programming language because of some loose associations.
There's no way this would cross anyone's mind. In particular, the ruby on rails community (or at least some segment of it) is very open, diverse and welcoming.
If an hypothetical swastika-lang came up promoting nazi ideology, banning swastika-lang projects would of course be sensible, but that's not the situation you're mentioning at all.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I can't believe I want to make a comment that includes the phrase "virtue signaling" but here we are. (Also, based on my CI (with codeberg.org deps), maybe they should worry about uptime...)
Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.
edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?
> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground
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
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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?
It looks like we need more alternatives...
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184
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.
I'd rather companies just provide me a service at a reasonable price. I don't need a corporation imposing it's ethics on me.
Well this is a charity providing services for free. If you want to be provided a service for a price, go elsewhere.
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.
Yet they bend under fascist requests like current US administration.
The problem is they can change their mind at a whim and all of a sudden you are on the other side of what they care about.
Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.
> Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine?
No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
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.
That is actually a great blog post! I wholeheartedly agree with the points they are making.
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.
If you avoid the discussion, you never get anywhere. Kudos to Codeberg for taking position.
Or as Poppa liked to remind me, if you don't stand for something (of your choosing)... you'll stand for anything. Kudos to Codeberg, indeed.
What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
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).
They are not the first code hosting service to do so. sourcehut banned cryptocurrency in 2022:
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
The difference is sourcehut has like 50 users
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 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.
"Democracy works OK when I agree with the result"
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...
So what?
I've never heard of either one, this is only a article because it has crypto + ban = karma.
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.
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.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
> 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.
That's not true. You can definitely think critically about the political context of things without being partizan about things.
Taking a stance does not mean you adopted an "us vs. them" mentality.
What a bonkers generalization.
How do you know what the politics will be next?
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
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.
> Well, if you're not part of the community, what do you care?
One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.
When I go to a vegetarian restaurant I don't demand they serve me a juicy meat burger.
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.
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.
What is a "reasonable GitHub alternative" exactly?
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%.
> How do you know what the politics will be next?
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.
Watching you succumb to indoctrination in real time. No, not everything is political, not anymore than 'everything is natural' or 'everything is power' or 'everything is [anything].'
You can certainly look at all things through whatever singular lens you would like, and certainly all things may ultimately have some aspect of any single facet, but to concede some totalistic view of the world is lazy.
And moral laziness is what defines Codeberg.
Just because most of everything has a political angle/facet does not mean it defines my life as much as it seem to do to you. It just serves to help me articulate my choices in life.
I would like to know how taking an active moral stand as Codeberg is doing is lazy. Especially when put in relation to armchair analysis on social media.
I can't understand what you're trying to say here.
> goodness knows how they think they can determine that
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.
This is why I don't use Mastodon. What you can see is completely reliant on what kind of politics the admin supports at that time.
But you use HN, where what you can see is completely reliant on what kind of politics the admin supports at that time?
> How do you know what the politics will be next?
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
A side effect of platform vs publisher.
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.
> platform vs publisher
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.
Indeed we see legislation (from all sides of politics and nations) saying there is no distinction, that all services and websites are now publishers.
It was ever thus except when we remember.
There never was a distinction. You made it up or believed someone who made it up.
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?
It's not a single political front, they have members (those who sponsor hosting), they decide by vote
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.
Honestly I respect it
I can't. What happened to pluralism?
I can ask you the same. Why don't you accept their politic stance?
Pluralism is when strangers are forced to host my code for free. The idea of somebody else putting their time and money into something and then not giving it to me is philosophically worrisome
The whole "codeberg is political" is the scary bit. Whose politics? How is it decided by members what exact politics to represent? Do some members have undue influence on exerting their particular politics?
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
I think you're misunderstanding "codeberg is political".
Everything is political, FOSS is political, GitHub is also political.
When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.
No, there's a big difference between "net effects are not guaranteed to be perfectly neutral" and "I am going to intentionally put my thumb on the scale".
The position that everything is political so therefore opinions are mandatory intentionally conflates these things.
You’re the one who seems to be conflating things - everything is political =/= opinions are mandatory.
The comment I was replying to said
> When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.
That assertion is incorrect. Said incorrect assertion is derived from the conflation I called out.
Reminder that you're commenting on the decision to make someone's political opinion against crypto mandatory for Codeberg
My issue with this is not that codeberg and its members want to uphold a certain set of political beliefs. Any private organization is free to do that. It's that they haven't defined the rule that's supposed to encode those beliefs.
As written, the rule is a non-exhaustive example of "content that harms codeberg's reputation". Someone asked in the pr whether "cryptocurrency-related" is defined anywhere and it merged without an answer. The responses to wording concerns was essentially they will figure it out later. Moves like this don't fill me with confidence.
Real-world lines are blurry. If you try to define a bright line, someone finds a loophole. Like the other thread (about codeberg banning vibecoded projects) had arguments about whether a project with 49.999% generated code would count. Which is based on a category error - things just don't work that way.
You're still not understanding the point. It's not about an organization being "private" or "public" (what does "private" even mean?). Everything is political. When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political, obscuring/obfuscating their actual underlying politics, and everything else is pushed outside of it. It is an attempt to create strict boundaries around the limits of discussion and action, which is itself a political act!
>When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political
What are you talking about? Whether something is allowed to be challenged has nothing to do with whether it's political. Actually, what even is not allowed to be challenged? I struggle to come up with a single example.
Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd. There is always an underlying politics, even if it has been normalized or obfuscated, repressed or unexamined. Reread my above comment.
You didn't answer my question about what is not allowed to be challenged.
>Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd.
I don't understand what you're saying. You switched tracked halfway through the thought from talking about communities that distinguish between things that are or aren't political to rejection of taking political stances.
What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on political issues. This is not merely not absurd, but pretty much necessary for any organization that doesn't have ideological goals and doesn't want to foster internal factions.
Like the sibling comment said, just banning cryptocurrency might be political or it might not, depending on the reason for it. Rejecting reasons such as "crypto bad" is a tenable position if an organization seeks to maintain a neutral stance.
Every organization has ideological goals. That's what I'm getting at. Sometimes they are unable to recognize it because it's been normalized. What you define as "neutral" is not actually neutral. Such statements are themselves attempts at controlling what is normal/acceptable. The terms of acceptable discussion is context-dependent, but trying to set them at "politics" is contradictory, as I've explained.
No, I think both, political and apolitical decisions can exist.
If you ban a project because its CI pipeline mines crypto and that ia a drain on your server, it is an apolitical argument.
If you ban a project because it drains recources because an AI agent is commutting multiple times a second, that is apolitical.
If you ban a project, because it hosts content that doesn't align with your ideals since it uses cryptocurrencies, that is clearly political.
Sure, there may be a small grey zone. But there are swaths of decicions that are clearly political/apolitical.
Is the set of acceptable uses for shared infrastructure not a political question? What's different between mining crypto on a free CI server, letting my cows eat all the grass at the park, or dumping industrial waste into the river?
Not every question is political, so it's often fine to say "that's not a political question".
But which questions are apolitical questions, is itself a political question.
This seems like a useless definition of political.
No I understand that. But the point I am making is saying that is much stronger than saying "our policy says we won't host crypto projects going forward". The latter is fine, any service provider can set terms as they fit within the law. But if you claim you are highly political, you must invite further questions into it.
How does Codeberg handle the diverse mix of politics within it and manage its influences? If we give the organization a character by calling it political, we create an obligation to explain further.
Overall, again I feel this is a self-own to project idealogue this hard since you flavor it in a specific way that is not inclusive.
> How does Codeberg handle the diverse mix of politics within it and manage its influence
They don't have to.
> Overall, again I feel this is a self-own to project idealogue this hard since you flavor it in a specific way that is not inclusive.
D.E.I. is out right now. Fortunately, Codeberg helpfully funds Forgejo, so all the non-eligible projects can benefit from self-hosting.
No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
The notion that "everything is political" is an indicator that someone has an extremely toxic relationship with politics. Basically you're projecting your unhealthy level of political engagement onto everyone else, and insisting that we all have that manner of thinking (but are just denying it to score political points). Well that isn't true, and for your own sake I encourage you to stop that. You'll be much happier when you stop making life about politics.
> No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What do you eat and what do you refuse to eat? Which restaurants would you go to or not? Which companies do you buy from and why/why not?
Who do you meet with and who do you avoid? What do you talk about and which topics do you avoid?
Where is your cocoa grown, which brand do you buy and who ends up making money on your purchase?
I don’t eat food that I am allergic to or don’t like the taste. What does that have to do with politics?
Even if you reduce it to that, you still endorse (or at least accept) the side effects of the production of what you eat.
If you eat meat, you are okay with the effects it has on climate change, and that’s political. If you do the opposite and don’t eat meat, that’s also political.
If you consume food from non-organic agriculture, you are okay with species extinction, especially insects.
If you buy the cheapest foods, you are okay with the working conditions and low pay necessary to reach the price. If you buy a more expensive option, who in the value chain benefits from the increased price and who doesn’t?
Almost everything that you do is political in some way.
That's disregarding that the people in power routinely make it as difficult as possible to have a choice. If you buy the cheapest foods, maybe it's because you want to eat and pay rent, and spending any more than that would render you homeless. Becoming homeless will not save the poor in another country, even if your purchases to avoid becoming homeless would have contributed a vanishingly tiny, indirect amount to their plight.
I agree that everything is political, and it's good to make choices as ethically as you can, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to be perfect. You can't even know about all the problems without studying them like a full time job. Ain't got time for that. Gotta eat.
The "agonize over every purchase and vote with your dollar" paradigm gives the most votes to billionaires.
Should people think about ethics when buying stuff: yes.
Does failing to recycle a bottle properly, or buying a cheap chocolate bar that may have involved underpaid or even slave labor somewhere in its supply chain, mean someone is evil? Nope.
I wish people would spend less time agonizing or moralizing over what individuals do (even though an individual is easier to influence quickly) and more time going after the broken systems, stupid laws, and malignant CEOs that actually lie at the root of the problems.
People in power removing your choices is definitely political.
But the moment you step into social realm it becomes political, as Mr. Aristotle said.
What do you mean? If I talk to a friend about stargazing that's political? If a group of people meet up to play a game of cards that's political?
So I am very pedantic here, but yes it "can" be seen as political. You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
I understand "everything is political" more in a sense that we as a society have the burden to shape our own rules, and saying "I only live in the society, but ignore the burden of making rules" is not really possible. In that case you actively decide to let someone else decide for you.
>You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
How is that political? It's just a decision based on competing priorities. By this interpretation an animal's decision to either sleep or eat is also political.
Oh boy, how wrong you are.
> When I enjoy a meal
What food do you eat, and where do you eat it? How much does it cost? Culturally, where does it come from? Who works the kitchens? Who cleans the place?
> When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political.
Where do you hang out? Who else goes there? Who even are your friends?
> When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What book are you reading? Does the country you live produce the cocoa you are drinking? Do you know where it comes from?
Everything is political to an extent, even the reason we have this discussion in English when English is not my native language.
I am not saying you have to think about those things all the time; that would be exhausting. But ignoring it and pretend everything is separated into its own nice little happy vacuum is too naive.
It's the politics of the paid membership of the Codeberg non-profit that funds the whole operation. They vote in yearly meetings.
I don't understand how the two are related, though. Voting yearly as a community does not make things "political" if the issues are not politically challenged themselves. For example, if a group of people get together and decide "hey we want to watch 10 movies this year" that in itself is not a political action. It's a governance action. But if they say, "Hey, let's watch these 10 movies but not watch 1 because we all think it is wrong to capitalize on bananas," that is a political action. In the first one, your individual politics do not matter for consensus but in the second one, it does and as a whole you need to take a stance on a subjective political matter as an organization. And if you take a stance as an organization, you must also accept the consequences of not being impartial which they don't seem to do. "It is political but the details of how/why/what votes are decided, how we think of politics, how it influences our worldwide, our basic ethical code etc are all unknown. BUT IT IS POLITICAL so buzz off." is not a good stance in my opinion, especially for a version control tool.
"So buzz off" (whether a direcy quote or not) seems like a sign they accept the consequence of some people buzzing off.
If they didn't do this, they'd have to accept the consequences of those people not buzzing off, or potentially a different segment of people buzzing off.
Doing nothing isn't an apolitical option either. That's a choice too.
> Why?
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.
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.
GitHub is the worst place to host your code. Except for all of the other places.
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.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
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.
It routinely bans projects for downloading media.
Github might randomly ban your project if USA decides they don't like the colour of your passport.
Yeah. Looks like it's either GitHub or self-hosted from now on. At least GitHub has a Sponsors thing. Not that I'm getting much out of it.
So it seems.
My self hosted gitforge disagrees.
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).
Evidence disagrees.
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.
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.
https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-checker.php is pretty handy for checking if you're on any of the major blocklists.
What's a coffee hosting service?
They also want to ban 'AI slop' - I'd love to see how they draw the lines on that one.
because it's a code hosting equivalent of all those Mastodons with 50 users.
>Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort
in the current year, that's a massive red flag.
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.
This happens to literally everything.
Come on, forge federation is a running joke. Nothing happened for years now
tangled exists and works (but not particularly well).
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).
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.
"the community" being some tiny subset of busybodies out of an OOMs-larger body of users that don't want to be bothered?
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
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.
this is a failure mode of consumer co-op that never occured to me. I thought the idea was bullet proof.
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.
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.
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.
Yes.
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.
This sounds like a very dumb decision to you and I and most, but see you don't use codeberg. I don't use codeberg.
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!
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".
I have an account and I donate regularly. I was not made aware a vote was happening.
You need to specifically register as an active member to get voting rights.
I wasn't made aware of any votes either.
Are you two only donating or are you members of the e.V.? Because I got the invitation to the assembly and 9 separate emails for each of the polls.
I don't get it. Wasn't it supposed to be a user led platform?
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.
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.
Donating and membership aren't the same.
Are you a voting member?
What does it take to get a vote? Could there be some sabotage here?
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.
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.
And what does it say about the person who comes on ycombinator to be outraged by it, yet completely unaffected?
"Democracy is a sheep and a wolf deciding what's for dinner"
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)
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
Radicle provides self-hosting with decentralized mirrors for both added availability and DDoS resistance.
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
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.
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.
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.
Last week the USA censored the domain name of a Dutch porn site.
there's decentralized git on Nostr:
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.
GIT IS DECENTRALIZED
But the identity part of git is not (unless you count pgp signing of each commit, which never took off at a large scale)
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
The identity of a repo is its url so yes, the identity part is decentralized
Issue tracking and collaboration tools are not. (Although many small projects could get by with a todo.txt and a mailing list.)
But if you just hashed all the changes and put them in Merkle tree to verify, wouldn't that make it so much better?
Yup, but the community you build around a project is not.
Git over Reticulum is another option. You get git, issue tracking (work documents), release management
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
I’m using self hosted GitLab; any reason I should check out something else?
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
The ability for others to send you pull requests without requiring an account on your gitlab instance
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.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
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.
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".
> Pretending
Are they though? I see "We are more than just Git hosting: Our community is ..." right in the highlight box on their landing page.
Run your own Codeberg instance with blackjack and hookers, it's open source.
At that point I'm running gitlab. It's better anyway.
Unless you really need some of its features, self hosting gitlab always felt like an exercise in maximizing hosting bills.
i'm sure the guy you're replying to also wants to "legalize comedy"
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.
Banning projects that haven't done anything wrong except implement algorithms that the Karen committee disagrees with is clearly an attack.
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?
Their own users voted for this.
So what is Codeberg’s political stance? From which ideology does it follow that crypto projects are bad, but VPN projects are not, for example?
Most people, and indeed groups of people, are far more complex than to be able to say "all my politics flow from this one ideology"
VPNs are generic networking/security tools that can also be used for things like circumventing geoblocking.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
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.
I believe it's agreement of a majority of voters.
So mob rule by whichever busybodies buy into the inner circle, with no fundamental principles whatsoever? Ugh.
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.
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.
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.
Probably for the kind of users codeberg wants to have, this boosts their reputation.
Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.
That's fair.
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.
Does Google or Microsoft do that?
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.
They definitely offer free services and block your usage based on ideology.
> And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
Oh, honey...
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.
Were you paying for Codeberg?
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.
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
It feels like a sizeable chunk of this website's user base gets triggered when anyone takes any stance at all.
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
Other than the neoliberalism stance, "money above all else". This is a marketing site for a VC firm, after all.
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.
What exactly about "how it was done" is alarming to you?
I might have used it in the future. Now I never will.
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.
I contribute to open source projects hosted by codeberg and have considered moving repos I control over there.
Germans democratically elected Hitler. A vote by less than 500 randoms means less than nothing.
> Germans democratically elected Hitler
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
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Banning cryptocurrency scams seems like a pretty good reason to use codeberg.
Sounds like a good idea. Too bad that's not what went into the ToS.
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.
> The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
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.
Yes, BUT there's a difference between holding the power and actually using it to enforce ideological positions.
and there's a difference between a monopolized market player doing it and a hole-in-the-wall free host.
Relatedly, Codeberg has also banned vibe-coded projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
Well there go my repos.
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.
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
Were you paying for the service?
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.
You misunderstand what Codeberg is.
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.
Also you only have a vote if you pay.
I'm sure they didn't even have a repository there to begin with.
This follows what SourceHut did in 2022 [1], but I think SourceHut did much better job to announce that (as of this writing).
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
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.
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.
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?
What a terrible precedent to set.
They banned cypto projects two weeks ago. Today they banned vibecoded projects. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
I'm not crazy about this:
> 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".
Specific change to ToS: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
> 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).
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.
They have no idea what "slop" is. They don't want to have to define it with any precision. Ironically, these rules will be enforced based on vibes.
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.
If I showed you an image with black sections and red sections, would you be able to decide whether it was mostly black or mostly red?
Maybe they use the definition from the HN guidelines [0]:
> 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
I don’t care about HN the same way I care about my development platform. If I want to show someone my life’s work I don’t send then to HackerNews.
Wait, why am I commenting here then?
That rule's for HN comments, not submissions. Nobody's getting kicked out for vibecoding a project.
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.
No thanks. I get enough of that bullshit in my own country.
Basically a popularity contest. It's high school all over again.
It is worse as in these cases any worldwide activist group can just pile into your small local high school and fore their "popularity" on you.
What do you propose is a better way of deciding things?
Sometimes the right move is to do nothing.
And sometimes, decisions have to be made.
Deliberative democracy is a thing.
High School keeps being funded, though.
> 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.
"Side projects with little resource usage"
Wow so they banned literally everything?
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.
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.
[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
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!
> what is a grace period
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?
wow so codeberg is goated?
No, you want to be able to host whatever code, not kicked off based on whatever the hate train is on to today.
i'm not an idiot. i can just a git repo in a variety of ways. it's just a bunch of text.
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.
They obviously care more about social performance than code.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
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.
They're probably paying members who voted for this
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.
That may work for software but boy does that sound like a milquetoast life if applied to everything.
“Nobody ever got fired buying IBM.”
A nice thing about Git is that you can trivially push to a new upstream any time you need.
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.
> But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
Why yes, in fact I am. One of the major reasons [1] I switched to GrapheneOS.
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
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!
This sends a really bad signal.
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
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.
> 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.
> 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?
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... [2]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/compare/17bdb39b0c1ecd0e42...
> 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.
There was a vote at the annual general meeting where all members could attend and vote.
"community led" != "ideology". That's a statement of governance style, which is a different level.
> The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts.
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
> 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.
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.
Another beauty of free software is they took the project from gitea and gogs before that.
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.
Literally every rule is decided by random popularity vibes. Name one that isn't?
At the same time now it's quite clear what is codeber for. Hosting active free software projects that are not vibecoded.
It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.
> 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.
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?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2026-05-monthly-report/#federation
> Or are you suggesting that there is going to be a significant split because of this?
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.
You know every project or collective used to have their own website and that was fine, right?
Good. That's how FOSS is supposed to work.
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.
They held an internal discussion amongst members and decided democratically which stance to take.
> “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
> There are some levels of censorship
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
I don't know what the actual stance is, and what counts as cryptocurrency or why the decision was made.
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.
https://www.github.com/forum/rules-for-cryptocurrency-projec...
404, oh no! Better never use github!
The forum is only for members of the non-profit. I'm guessing the page is 404 because we are not dues-paying members, which is reasonable.
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.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh
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.
Welp. Looks like I'm never going back there.
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
How do you define "slop" ?
the same way United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined porn in Jacobellis v. Ohio, you know it when you see it
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?
Ain't no point being proud of what you didn't do
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.
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.
>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.
> the overall effect is not hard to identify
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.
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.
Can you provide any links regarding the Forgejo incident? I haven't heard about that.
Looks like another project that's gonna purity spiral into People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front weirdos sniping at each other.
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.
https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
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.
That's it. I'm leaving Codeberg. Feels like if European Union was turned into a code forge.
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.
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.
Was it less fragmented when everyone had their own website?
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.
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'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
> On the other hand this will definitely devolve into name calling and vigilantism.
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
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'm not following. Your last comment on Lobsters[0] was 4 days ago, that's not soft quitting. And even if it is, how is soft quitting war?
[0]: https://lobste.rs/~matheusmoreira
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.
> how is soft quitting war?
Culture war, I suppose.
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 will probably be fine.
"Chuds" ?
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.
Oh, really? And what uncomfortable truths have you been slinging?
Every open source project ends up politically opinionated because the people behind it is married to the idea of that project than what it delivers.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
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.
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.
Your comment makes two wrong assumptions:
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)
This is incredible, really. A code hosting service started as a safe haven from US political tantrums now itself became even more political.
Name an online service that is not political
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.
> The text is now as-is because it was send out for votes. Small clarifications can be made afterwards by Presidium or Board.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
Yes it's called the general assembly of codeberg eV (the non-profit). Members can vote, they have the power.
Social signaling, surprise surprise!
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.
There is one. It's called Forgejo
I bet Microsoft loves that these GitHub competitors shoot themselves in the foot so often.
What is a "GitHub competitor"?
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.
This is a battle that likely shouldn’t be handled as a war on crypto, simply change the wording of your TOS. Absolutely nuclear.
This is a slippery slope, and I will stay away from Codeberg, because who knows what they'll ban next.
And that's a slippery slope fallacy.
They banned all LLM assisted projects.
It’s not a fallacy if it actually happened.
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 ».
Well we don’t know, do we?
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.
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?
Seems fine to me. It’s just a Bluesky version of GitHub. That was always going to do various odd bans.
https://tangled.org/ is the "Bluesky version of GitHub"
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
My code repository should host my code, not go on dubious moral crusades. Glad I stayed on Github.
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
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)
Personally this makes me glad I moved to Tangled rather than Codeberg. I don't know how this will be enforced, but I'd be scared of similar things happening in the future to something I'm working on and all the strife that could come with the sudden removal.
For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.
Makes me wonder if all non memory safe code will be on the chopping block in the next 5 years. Will they find it morally justifiable to "protect" people from evil unsafe languages?
I thought the government already made those languages illegal
> what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions
Wow hold your horses. It's one thing to ban an individual and their projects. It's another thing entirely to ban an entire programming language because of some loose associations.
There's no way this would cross anyone's mind. In particular, the ruby on rails community (or at least some segment of it) is very open, diverse and welcoming.
If an hypothetical swastika-lang came up promoting nazi ideology, banning swastika-lang projects would of course be sensible, but that's not the situation you're mentioning at all.
Will you eat your hat? It's not that far from many seemingly popular takes I see on fediverse regularly.
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
I get "Access denied" when trying to access. Can anyone archive?
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/
Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.
Codeberg is not a company.
That’s why you don’t trust anything EU made.
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 didn't know of codeberg before and this is likely the last time I'll see it.
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
This is not a marketing stunt. This is not a company and there is no PR department. This is a non-profit making a decision in its general assembly.
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.
Seems like it's not for me, gotta move elsewhere.
Didn't they do this a while ago already?
The discussion has been going on for years, but apparently the formal vote and terms of service change took place recently.
Apparently in early this month.
This is fash*sm
Not just cryptocurrency projects, cryptocurrency related projects. But hey, it's their space.
Probably figuring they can afford their own git hosting and don't need charity.
If I got some library that I wrote that a cryptocurrency decides is useful to it, do I get kicked off the platform?
The Onion needs to parody these recent decisions "Codeberg bans any code base hosted on Codeberg for violating ToS" lol
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.
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.
Good, based. We need some pesticide.
Now ban AI
Probably would have been better to do this before the moral outrage had moved on to AI. Now it just seems pointless.
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.
Related:
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
Who?
> “ 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
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.
Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.
from your lips to gods ear!
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.
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.
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.
Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...
They don't want side projects. They aren't a git dump. They want actual projects.
Is that criteria clear in their platform?
Bitcoin was supposed to give us a way to have digital cash without bankers controlling the system for their benefit. How did we fuck this up so badly?
Because we didn't understand that bankers are emergent behavior
If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.
Err Codeberg bans vibe coded projects (150 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
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.
[0] https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I can't believe I want to make a comment that includes the phrase "virtue signaling" but here we are. (Also, based on my CI (with codeberg.org deps), maybe they should worry about uptime...)
Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.
edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?
> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground
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
Codeberg can ban whatever they want on their platform. The thing is nobody cares about codeberg, and this is probably just a publicity stunt.
Clearly some people do care about Codeberg given how much palpitating outrage there is in this very thread.
Yep, the outrage is the whole point of this marketing scheme.
I’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
The stunt angle might make sense, but banning vibe code too kinda contradicts it.
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.
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.
What about emulators? E2EE? P2P software? Software that gets used to leak state secrets? VPNs?
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.
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.
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?
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.
"The only good thing about crypto is using it for <entire reason crypto exists>"
Well, sounds like it is a successful technology.
That got a hearty laugh out of me.
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.
Monero is digital cash and protects privacy, a human right.
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.
You can say the same for AI btw
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
> You can say the same for AI btw
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...
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."
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.
Oh good, my mistake in not knowing what the tag meant