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bArray 12 hours ago [-]
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.
bko 10 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Well this is a charity providing services for free. If you want to be provided a service for a price, go elsewhere.
tarpitt 9 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes.
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
1shooner 4 hours ago [-]
>What if I donated?
Then you would have been a supporting member, and had the opportunity to vote on this decision.
Timon3 2 hours ago [-]
This step perfectly aligns with the political direction Codeberg had from the very start.
Who are you to now come in and demand they change to fit your political stance?
This isn't very cool of you.
KptMarchewa 8 hours ago [-]
Yet they bend under fascist requests like current US administration.
mlrtime 9 hours ago [-]
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.
ModernMech 2 hours ago [-]
Can't every company do that at any time though? How is being on the other side of an ethical line different or more risky from being on the other side of a spreadsheet-driven line. One day you're in a green cell and it's all good, the next you're in a red cell and on the other side of what they care about (just green cells).
Forgeties79 6 hours ago [-]
And go where instead? GitHub?
Oxodao 5 hours ago [-]
host your own. Codeberg is literally based on Forgejo you can setup on your own
tarpitt 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
surgical_fire 9 hours ago [-]
Codeberg is based on Berlin, Germany.
Germany doesn't have a "Freedom of Speech" first amendment. As far as I know that is endemic to the US.
If you dislike their stance you can host your cryptocurrency scam elsewhere, there is no shortage of git hosting services.
tarpitt 9 hours ago [-]
I didn't say it violated the first ammendment. I said it violated the principle of free speech. It's the same principle that justifies your ability to post in this discussion here, right now, despite the fact that you don't believe in it yourself.
Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services. No big deal right? After all they can just go somewhere else. No, clearly this is not reasonable. But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
mapotofu 8 hours ago [-]
Hey. It isn’t the same principle. We have guidelines here, too. For instance: “ Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.” “Avoid generic tangents.” Etc.
surgical_fire 5 hours ago [-]
> It's the same principle that justifies your ability to post in this discussion here, right now, despite the fact that you don't believe in it yourself.
HN has rules. I can be banned if I violate them.
It seems this very site does not uphold the free speech principle all that much.
> Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services.
Sure, if it suits them. Fine by me. I believe in freedom of association.
There are some limitations for certain public services to avoid discrimination and segregation, but apart for that, I don't care.
In fact, I host my own Gitea instance for my private projects.
> But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
It absolutely does not. Speech was not completely free in any country I lived in, and society worked out fine.
There is a degree of freedom within the democratic framework of those countries, but there are absolutely rules limiting speech. And it is fine, societies are all about compromises.
That is actually a great blog post! I wholeheartedly agree with the points they are making.
bArray 9 hours ago [-]
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.
tripzilch 3 hours ago [-]
> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
KetoManx64 3 hours ago [-]
> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
allarm 2 hours ago [-]
> Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain.
Which is a waste of energy.
KetoManx64 2 hours ago [-]
You know what's a real waste of energy?
The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.
qwm 50 minutes ago [-]
Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol
NetOpWibby 6 hours ago [-]
They really quoted the FBI Director in their reasoning? Unserious people.
Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”
If you avoid the discussion, you never get anywhere. Kudos to Codeberg for taking position.
bravetraveler 10 hours ago [-]
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.
NotGMan 7 hours ago [-]
The problem with imposing ethics is that, in the future, they might change their views or mark other political problems as verboten.
No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
selfmodruntime 5 hours ago [-]
I'm out. No place that has ever publicly advertised itself to be "political" has ever changed for the beter.
surgical_fire 9 hours ago [-]
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).
zombot 10 hours ago [-]
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.
sunshine-o 8 hours ago [-]
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.
curiousObject 5 hours ago [-]
>the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank
What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
tripzilch 3 hours ago [-]
While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
sunshine-o 2 hours ago [-]
There are about 8k validators [0].
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world.
So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
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.
bcye 11 hours ago [-]
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.
FireInsight 5 hours ago [-]
Slippery slope. AI and crypto are legitimetely controversial new technologies, though both have their uses. I can't imagine "offline mapping application" or "Linux CLI utility" or "self-hostable web app" being categories of software that become controversial in the future. Besides, migrating a repo to another Forgejo instance is simple enough.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
"As of July 2028, Linux-specific projects are now banned from Codeberg - the Linux kernel development community believes in harmful and racist concepts like meritocracy"
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
This happens to literally everything.
nailer 4 hours ago [-]
> It's for principled, quality, open source, community-first software.
Assuming that people that use blockchains are not principled is similar to assuming that people that use arrays are not principled.
Maybe more ridiculous, as you're supporting banks, card companies, and money transfer providers taking 1-6% of everyone's transactions.
FireInsight 2 hours ago [-]
The ban is not for "all blockchain-related projects", it's for "projects that harm the reputation of Codeberg" with the newly added clarification that they may include cryptocurrency projects for example. Moderation is not very proactive on Codeberg. This terms addition basically gives them clearance to ban a cryptocurrency project that is deemed to harm the site's/community's reputation by for example being a scammy shitcoin.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
> with the newly added clarification that they may include cryptocurrency projects for example.
Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').
RamblingCTO 11 hours ago [-]
Come on, forge federation is a running joke. Nothing happened for years now
aveao 10 hours ago [-]
tangled exists and works (but not particularly well).
RamblingCTO 7 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I meant in gitea. I need to have a look at tangled, I already have the tab opened
acedTrex 7 hours ago [-]
I looked into contributing but found the existing ecosystem to be very confusing and convoluted.
firloop 17 hours ago [-]
They are not the first code hosting service to do so. sourcehut banned cryptocurrency in 2022:
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.
iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
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.)
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
"Democracy works OK when I agree with the result"
andai 13 hours ago [-]
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...
dokyun 12 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 7 hours ago [-]
He may not be, but the product has been. Same goes with Theo and OpenBSD.
Hyper-productive people are often volatile. Putting up with it is a necessary tradeoff, as the systems they produce often fill a niche that nobody else will serve adequately.
dokyun 53 minutes ago [-]
Guys like Theo have a baseline to uphold and I think decades of dealing with the public on an open project with specific goals that need to be met would turn anyone sour. People respect him for his actual work though, like they used to with Torvalds before he got bought out by IBM.
Drew I think is just kind of a dick who has a history of putting his personal crusades before delivering a product people want. I remember a few years back sourcehut being reported as unstable and he went and lashed out at people who were complaining to him about it instead of fixing the issues. And he banned crypto projects cause he doesn't like them, at least Codeberg held it to a vote.
Patrick Volkerding is a pretty stable guy, I think he's the model more BDFLs should strive to be.
iamnothere 42 minutes ago [-]
Patrick is an unusual exception; I’d actually put people like Drew, Theo, and pre-corporate Linus in the midpoint. The opposite extreme of Patrick would be unfortunate cases like Reiser and Ian Murdock.
I think Drew suffers a little from lack of focus. I greatly appreciate his work on Harelang, sway, and aerc for instance, but these are quite far from his Sourcehut work. (I can see how aerc and Sourcehut dovetail with the plaintext email focus, at least.)
nailer 7 hours ago [-]
Does Codeberg have users? This is the first time I've heard of it and likely the last.
Klonoar 3 hours ago [-]
The entire Zig project made a big fuss about moving there recently.
Anecdotally I’ve come across a number of smaller crates in the Rust ecosystem that store their code there. Usually European devs.
zombot 10 hours ago [-]
So what?
mlrtime 9 hours ago [-]
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.
jjmarr 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hogwasher 11 hours ago [-]
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.
veeti 7 hours ago [-]
Do you also see your local library hosting Mein Kampf as statement of support for fascism on part of the librarian?
EligibleDecoy 4 hours ago [-]
It is a political statement about the freedom of press though, no? Some libraries ban books, others do not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not political.
mlrtime 9 hours ago [-]
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.
surgical_fire 9 hours ago [-]
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.
duxup 16 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 14 hours ago [-]
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.
0x3f 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
throwa356262 11 hours ago [-]
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.
0x3f 11 hours ago [-]
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.
Oxodao 5 hours ago [-]
GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, SourceForge, SourceHut, and that's just from the top of my head. That's not what I call "vanishingly rare"
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
What is a "reasonable GitHub alternative" exactly?
joepie91_ 8 hours ago [-]
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.
StrontiumK9 11 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 9 hours ago [-]
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%.
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
Did you know that Australia requires everyone to vote in national elections?
There are also systems that exist between “legally mandated voting” and “whoever shows up”.
You could even set different thresholds based on the importance of the issue! (Decisions like ToS changes would seem to be quite important.)
Y-bar 12 hours ago [-]
> 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.
mw888 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Y-bar 11 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
I can't understand what you're trying to say here.
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
> 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?)
ChocolateGod 11 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
But you use HN, where what you can see is completely reliant on what kind of politics the admin supports at that time?
lostmsu 5 hours ago [-]
Admins on HN rarely delete articles
TaLiTr 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, because the admins are reasonable.
Just like it's possible to find Mastodon servers with reasonable admins.
But the GPs comment blamed Mastodon as a whole for allowing the possibility of admin abuse, which isn't substantially different from HN.
6 hours ago [-]
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thinkingemote 11 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
> 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.
thinkingemote 10 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
There never was a distinction. You made it up or believed someone who made it up.
andai 13 hours ago [-]
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?
f_devd 12 hours ago [-]
It's not a single political front, they have members (those who sponsor hosting), they decide by vote
stratocumulus0 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Forgeties79 17 hours ago [-]
Honestly I respect it
gruez 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
wasmitnetzen 12 hours ago [-]
I can ask you the same. Why don't you accept their politic stance?
esseph 6 hours ago [-]
What happened for standing up for something you believe in
jrflowers 16 hours ago [-]
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
16 hours ago [-]
altmanaltman 16 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
pretendgeneer 16 hours ago [-]
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.
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Forgeties79 16 hours ago [-]
You’re the one who seems to be conflating things - everything is political =/= opinions are mandatory.
tbrownaw 15 hours ago [-]
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.
6 hours ago [-]
orbital-decay 12 hours ago [-]
Reminder that you're commenting on the decision to make someone's political opinion against crypto mandatory for Codeberg
Forgeties79 6 hours ago [-]
They’re banning crypto projects. There’s no screening for your opinion on crypto. Let’s not make this into something it isn’t.
causalmodels 16 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
It sounds like Codeberg needs to define both clear guidelines and a systematic process by which potential violations of the policy can be fairly reviewed and/or appealed—table stakes for a system that’s going to be integrated into your project as a hosting provider and community hub.
What you seem to be arguing for is seat-of-the-pants reactive mob governance. Functional communities and societies don’t work that way.
tkel 14 hours ago [-]
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!
fluoridation 14 hours ago [-]
>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.
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
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.
TobTobXX 12 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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?
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
Most people distinguish practical questions from normative questions. Practical questions may have some small political component, but usually it’s not useful or constructive to consider them as political issues.
Some practical questions have an obvious political dimension, in which case it’s fair to consider that component, but people will often argue over whether the question is “political enough” to justify debate. To deal with this, you need processes to ensure that debate is contained but not overly restricted on this kind of issue.
Making every question political is a trick right out of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Whether to pay the hosting bill shouldn’t be a political question. Whether to change hosts may or may not be, depending on the reasoning.
fluoridation 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 9 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 4 hours ago [-]
To name one easy example, for-profit companies don't have ideological goals.
But just for the sake of argument I'll grant it and amend my statement: What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on irrelevant political issues. A cat shelter doesn't need to have an official position on abortion to function, and in all likelihood having one would be counter to its purposes.
vintermann 11 hours ago [-]
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.
pluralmonad 13 hours ago [-]
This seems like a useless definition of political.
16 hours ago [-]
altmanaltman 16 hours ago [-]
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.
overfeed 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
bigstrat2003 14 hours ago [-]
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.
andor 13 hours ago [-]
> 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?
xigoi 12 hours ago [-]
I don’t eat food that I am allergic to or don’t like the taste. What does that have to do with politics?
andor 12 hours ago [-]
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.
hogwasher 10 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
People in power removing your choices is definitely political.
wolvesechoes 14 hours ago [-]
But the moment you step into social realm it becomes political, as Mr. Aristotle said.
fluoridation 14 hours ago [-]
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?
notrealyme123 13 hours ago [-]
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.
fluoridation 12 hours ago [-]
>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.
surgical_fire 11 hours ago [-]
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.
jjmarr 16 hours ago [-]
It's the politics of the paid membership of the Codeberg non-profit that funds the whole operation. They vote in yearly meetings.
altmanaltman 16 hours ago [-]
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.
hogwasher 10 hours ago [-]
"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.
JumpCrisscross 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
danpalmer 16 hours ago [-]
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.
surgical_fire 9 hours ago [-]
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.
lostmsu 5 hours ago [-]
Maybe? They must be
thrance 6 hours ago [-]
We've had enough time with crypto as a technology to see that it provides strictly negative value to the world. Banning all related projects wholesale is not unreasonable, in my book.
mbac32768 17 hours ago [-]
GitHub is the worst place to host your code. Except for all of the other places.
DaSHacka 16 hours ago [-]
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.
aveao 10 hours ago [-]
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.
lostmsu 5 hours ago [-]
codesalem.org
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
It routinely bans projects for downloading media.
LtWorf 12 hours ago [-]
Github might randomly ban your project if USA decides they don't like the colour of your passport.
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
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.
hackermanai 17 hours ago [-]
So it seems.
OtomotO 16 hours ago [-]
My self hosted gitforge disagrees.
aveao 10 hours ago [-]
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).
gmerc 16 hours ago [-]
Evidence disagrees.
lopatin 17 hours ago [-]
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!
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
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.
hackinthebochs 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Equating someone not wanting you on their website with tyranny sure is a take.
You’re welcome to host it at your own venue. Or , I guess, to keep whining that you’re not being given free services by someone who dislikes your work.
burnt-resistor 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
avaer 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
weakened_malloc 17 hours ago [-]
They also want to ban 'AI slop' - I'd love to see how they draw the lines on that one.
firloop 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cute_boi 17 hours ago [-]
And it’s easy to detect slop that sucks up infrastructure resources just by looking at commit rates. For example, Peter Steinberger made 271,281 commits. No wonder GitHub goes down regularly because of the increase in slop activity.
nighteous 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
vitalyan8184 17 hours ago [-]
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.
trentor 17 hours ago [-]
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.
comeonbro 17 hours ago [-]
"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.
alloyed 17 hours ago [-]
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!
iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
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.
masafej536 16 hours ago [-]
this is a failure mode of consumer co-op that never occured to me. I thought the idea was bullet proof.
15 hours ago [-]
tancop 11 hours ago [-]
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.
lmz 15 hours ago [-]
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.
trentor 17 hours ago [-]
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.
sergiotapia 17 hours ago [-]
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!
16 hours ago [-]
surgical_fire 8 hours ago [-]
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.
Lerc 17 hours ago [-]
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".
vlugorilla 3 hours ago [-]
The “majority” is a fiction. I received no email from Codeberg, nor was I aware that a vote was taking place. I use Codeberg as my main code forge. My projects are not vibe-coded, but some are indirectly related to cryptocurrency in that they use some of the same technologies. This decision appears arbitrary, and I no longer trust Codeberg to host my code for the long term. What will the 'majority' come up with next year?
I have an account and I donate regularly. I was not made aware a vote was happening.
TheChaplain 14 hours ago [-]
You need to specifically register as an active member to get voting rights.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
I wasn't made aware of any votes either.
juliangmp 14 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 14 hours ago [-]
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.
omnimus 13 hours ago [-]
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.
juliangmp 12 hours ago [-]
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.
12 hours ago [-]
LtWorf 10 hours ago [-]
Donating and membership aren't the same.
kajman 15 hours ago [-]
Are you a voting member?
cush 14 hours ago [-]
What does it take to get a vote? Could there be some sabotage here?
juliangmp 14 hours ago [-]
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.
teravor 16 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 10 hours ago [-]
And what does it say about the person who comes on ycombinator to be outraged by it, yet completely unaffected?
dizhn 15 hours ago [-]
"Democracy is a sheep and a wolf deciding what's for dinner"
tapoxi 17 hours ago [-]
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.
aveao 10 hours ago [-]
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).
b40d-48b2-979e 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
tapoxi 17 hours ago [-]
It's not about crypto, its about process. Compare this action to one by Debian or Wikipedia where there's a formal proposal, time for written pros and cons with convincing arguments for each side, and a meeting where the vote is held and impact to stakeholders is discussed.
You can't make large changes like this without undermining your viability as stable infrastructure.
cyberax 17 hours ago [-]
What "process"?
It's a simple rule: "no cryptocurrency projects".
DaSHacka 16 hours ago [-]
Obviously the 'process' is how you arrive at the rule.
If it was just one guy who arbitrarily decided as such, that's not much of a 'process' and is exactly what GP was calling out.
cyberax 16 hours ago [-]
No. The process was handled as usual: a proposal was made, and people voted. Overwhelmingly to ban crypto.
birksherty 16 hours ago [-]
Too many scammers in crypto. It's a good decision. Cryptos and scammers can host their own.
iamnothere 17 hours ago [-]
This attitude is toxic and will drive off other projects that aren’t associated with crypto. Once you have to factor in political risk with your source hosting, other alternatives become more appealing.
At this point any project that’s even vaguely controversial ought to be looking at fully decentralized solutions like Radicle.
b40d-48b2-979e 16 hours ago [-]
It's easy: don't be a scammer.
iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
“Don’t be a scammer”
“Don’t be an AI bro”
“Don’t be a Russian”
“Don’t be a fascist”
“Don’t be an antisemite”
“Don’t be a (insert boogeyman here)”
“Don’t be a sympathizer”
“Don’t be an enemy of the state”
These words are manipulations, and they will eventually catch up with you.
Cider9986 15 hours ago [-]
"Don't be a pirate"
Agreed. No way I will ever use Codeberg from now on.
b40d-48b2-979e 6 hours ago [-]
Comparing crypto scammers to political dissidents is a WILD slippery slope strawman.
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
Your willful lack of understanding is remarkable. There are non-scam uses of crypto, although I admit that there are more scams right now than non-scams. Regardless, painting all crypto devs as “scammers” is as absurd as painting political dissidents as “subversives” or “traitors”. It’s manipulative language, and it opens the door for classifying other software as “good” or “bad” based on highly flexible public opinion.
Mistletoe 17 hours ago [-]
You don’t think Satoshi Nakamoto had credibility or professionalism? It’s not fair to lump the bad seeds in with the good. Imagine if I said the US Dollar was a scam because drug cartels or AI companies use it.
tired-turtle 17 hours ago [-]
That comparison to USD strikes me as disingenuous.
Currency is a measure of social trust; it allows social contributions to be measured in a fungible unit. Cryptocurrencies erase this concept of social trust under the purported claim that anonymous transfer of “money” is good for society, forgetting why humans created currency in the first place. Anonymity abets money laundering, illicit drug trade, human trafficking/slavery, and CSAM, along with a raft of other antisocial behaviors.
Yes, you can do all of the above with USD, but you’ll have to put a lot more effort into doing so. Hence, it is fair to lump the bad in with the good for crypto (IMO) because it’s unclear how the benefits of crypto outweigh the antisocial behavior it enables. What has society gained in return?
bit-anarchist 17 hours ago [-]
You have it backwards, most cryptocurrencies transactions are, at best, pseudononymous, where, by contrast, cash transactions are anonymous by default.
> What has society gained in return?
A currency technology that doesn't rely on central authority, slavery nor imperialism to exist.
tired-turtle 16 hours ago [-]
I wrote USD, not cash. Most transactions in USD are electronic, not physical, so it’s a little unclear what point you’re trying to make.
bit-anarchist 16 hours ago [-]
USD includes cash. In fact, cash is the preferred payment method for criminal things, contending with Monero, so complaining about its inclusion is certainly something.
Going even further, cryptcurrencies, being distrusted ledgers, still fulfill the ability to test for someone "social trust" within a transaction, anonymous or not. Also, it's not like we, as the whole society, have access to your transaction history at all times with USD (which we do with Bitcoin, funnily enough).
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
Anyone who lives in a country with high inflation and unstable monetary policy can now use crypto to store wealth. Calling crypto inherently bad is pure first world privilege.
17 hours ago [-]
nyanmatt 17 hours ago [-]
So what, then? Disallow code that isn't deemed credible or professional by what metric? This whole thing is getting too political. I just want to write open-source software and let the users decide its worth.
nighteous 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
fishgoesblub 17 hours ago [-]
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)
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.
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
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.
17 hours ago [-]
ivan888 17 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Last week the USA censored the domain name of a Dutch porn site.
trollbridge 16 hours ago [-]
I’m using self hosted GitLab; any reason I should check out something else?
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
tapoxi 3 hours ago [-]
GitLab is a kitchen sink tool for all the good and bad that entails. Forgejo is much more lightweight.
Tepix 14 hours ago [-]
The ability for others to send you pull requests without requiring an account on your gitlab instance
trollbridge 7 hours ago [-]
I’m referring to the self hosted part. The outside world can send pull requests via the public GitLab mirror, or they can actually also access my self hosted GitLab instance via its public address - although I doubt anyone would bother.
(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)
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.
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
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".
ShinyLeftPad 15 hours ago [-]
Run your own Codeberg instance with blackjack and hookers, it's open source.
zelias 7 hours ago [-]
You know what, forget the Codeberg instance!
whateveracct 14 hours ago [-]
i'm sure the guy you're replying to also wants to "legalize comedy"
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
At that point I'm running gitlab. It's better anyway.
pibaker 12 hours ago [-]
Unless you really need some of its features, self hosting gitlab always felt like an exercise in maximizing hosting bills.
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
birksherty 16 hours ago [-]
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.
zarzavat 16 hours ago [-]
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?
acedTrex 7 hours ago [-]
> Pretending to run an inclusive git hosting service
They are not trying to run an inclusive service.
fzeroracer 16 hours ago [-]
Their own users voted for this.
p-e-w 16 hours ago [-]
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?
andor 13 hours ago [-]
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.
p-e-w 12 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
I believe it's agreement of a majority of voters.
p-e-w 10 hours ago [-]
So mob rule by whichever busybodies buy into the inner circle, with no fundamental principles whatsoever? Ugh.
inigyou 9 hours ago [-]
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.
joepie91_ 8 hours ago [-]
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.
fishgoesblub 7 hours ago [-]
> Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
Very similar things can be said about VPNs. Seeing only the bad to justify banning an entire category is terrible.
squigz 8 hours ago [-]
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"
Communitivity 15 hours ago [-]
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.
omnimus 13 hours ago [-]
Were you paying for Codeberg?
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.
avaer 17 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
Does Google or Microsoft do that?
avaer 17 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
They definitely offer free services and block your usage based on ideology.
squigz 16 hours ago [-]
> And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
Oh, honey...
heiogalma 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
DaSHacka 16 hours ago [-]
Who's to say we were never going to use Codeberg? I actually had quite a favorable impression of it before now, as I know many projects that had to flee to it thanks to GitHub's terrible DMCA system and Microsoft randomly locking their accounts.
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
Now you get to have your own website instead!
iepathos 15 hours ago [-]
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.
LtWorf 10 hours ago [-]
Probably for the kind of users codeberg wants to have, this boosts their reputation.
pibaker 17 hours ago [-]
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.
witx 12 hours ago [-]
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
pibaker 11 hours ago [-]
It feels like a sizeable chunk of this website's user base gets triggered when anyone takes any stance at all.
witx 11 hours ago [-]
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
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Other than the neoliberalism stance, "money above all else". This is a marketing site for a VC firm, after all.
bel8 17 hours ago [-]
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.
squigz 16 hours ago [-]
What exactly about "how it was done" is alarming to you?
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
I might have used it in the future. Now I never will.
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
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.
hparadiz 13 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
> 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
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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.
sneak 16 hours ago [-]
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.
pibaker 15 hours ago [-]
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.
elictronic 16 hours ago [-]
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.
skippyfish 14 hours ago [-]
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.
JuniperMesos 17 hours ago [-]
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.
elictronic 16 hours ago [-]
Banning cryptocurrency scams seems like a pretty good reason to use codeberg.
aliasxneo 14 hours ago [-]
Sounds like a good idea. Too bad that's not what went into the ToS.
MallocVoidstar 17 hours ago [-]
> 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
JuniperMesos 17 hours ago [-]
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.
delfinom 17 hours ago [-]
Yes, BUT there's a difference between holding the power and actually using it to enforce ideological positions.
unethical_ban 17 hours ago [-]
and there's a difference between a monopolized market player doing it and a hole-in-the-wall free host.
iamnothere 17 hours ago [-]
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.
heiogalma 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
0x3f 12 hours ago [-]
> If you violated the GPL, and your project was taken down, how political is that?
It's political, inherently, but it's not "only" political, or it's not necessarily political on the part of the host. As in, most practical hosts _have_ to obey US IP law. They don't _have_ to ban crypto or LLMs. The former only inconveniences or restricts me insofar as the host is unwilling to go to prison. The latter on their whims or personal views.
iamnothere 17 hours ago [-]
Software like Tor and I2P that allows for anonymity and circumvention of state control. Monero. Decentralized E2EE messengers. Nostr. Open source 3D printer slicers. Libreboot. Software for decoding DRM streams. GrapheneOS.
15 hours ago [-]
minimaxir 17 hours ago [-]
Relatedly, Codeberg has also banned vibe-coded projects.
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.
overfeed 15 hours ago [-]
Were you paying for the service?
overfeed 12 hours ago [-]
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.
pamcake 10 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Also you only have a vote if you pay.
LtWorf 9 hours ago [-]
I'm sure they didn't even have a repository there to begin with.
nilshauk 16 hours ago [-]
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.
lifthrasiir 17 hours ago [-]
This follows what SourceHut did in 2022 [1], but I think SourceHut did much better job to announce that (as of this writing).
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.
qwm 48 minutes ago [-]
I guess I kind of agree with this, but Monero-related stuff is the exception for me.
jdormit 17 hours ago [-]
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).
simonw 4 hours ago [-]
The rationale in the ToS change and the rationale in the blog post don't match up.
The ToS change grammar could do with tightening up as well.
what 14 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
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.
andai 13 hours ago [-]
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.
holgerschurig 12 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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?
what 14 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 14 hours ago [-]
No thanks. I get enough of that bullshit in my own country.
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
Basically a popularity contest. It's high school all over again.
PeterStuer 12 hours ago [-]
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.
squigz 14 hours ago [-]
What do you propose is a better way of deciding things?
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
Sometimes the right move is to do nothing.
squigz 14 hours ago [-]
And sometimes, decisions have to be made.
drdaeman 13 hours ago [-]
Deliberative democracy is a thing.
DANmode 14 hours ago [-]
High School keeps being funded, though.
close04 13 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
fragmede 12 hours ago [-]
Wait, why am I commenting here then?
close04 7 hours ago [-]
You just expect platforms implement “no AI content” rules based on what you care about more. I mean you should leave the platform if you want to create more AI life’s work and they don’t let you, not everything works for everybody, but you can’t come out and object on principle when you accept it elsewhere. This is good for the people who want to signal there’s no AI slop in their work.
And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.
matheusmoreira 13 hours ago [-]
That rule's for HN comments, not submissions. Nobody's getting kicked out for vibecoding a project.
close04 7 hours ago [-]
You’re trying to make a meaningless distinction to justify holding different parties to different standards: comments are HN’s core content, code is Codeberg’s core content.
HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.
Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?
kajman 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
imtringued 13 hours ago [-]
"Side projects with little resource usage"
Wow so they banned literally everything?
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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.
mbreese 16 hours ago [-]
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.
axus 14 hours ago [-]
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.
rtpg 13 hours ago [-]
> 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.
Given that they're a non-profit membership association with explicitly political goals where every new user represents a direct cost to the organization, and not a startup on a comfortable cushion of VC moneybags looking to pump the numbers for a quick acquisition, I very much doubt that a "growth strategy" is what they're going for here.
throw49404040 13 hours ago [-]
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!
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
> 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?
whateveracct 14 hours ago [-]
wow so codeberg is goated?
Cider9986 14 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
whateveracct 14 hours ago [-]
i'm not an idiot. i can just a git repo in a variety of ways. it's just a bunch of text.
not_your_vase 12 hours ago [-]
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.
timmmmmmay 4 hours ago [-]
this is fun! I'm excited to see what they'll ban two weeks from now
echelon 15 hours ago [-]
They obviously care more about social performance than code.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
comeonbro 16 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
They're probably paying members who voted for this
raincole 16 hours ago [-]
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.
birksherty 16 hours ago [-]
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.
Marsymars 14 hours ago [-]
That may work for software but boy does that sound like a milquetoast life if applied to everything.
duxup 16 hours ago [-]
“Nobody ever got fired buying IBM.”
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
A nice thing about Git is that you can trivially push to a new upstream any time you need.
tehbeard 13 hours ago [-]
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.
isodev 16 hours ago [-]
> 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?
gslepak 16 hours ago [-]
Why yes, in fact I am. One of the major reasons [1] I switched to GrapheneOS.
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!
kleene_op 13 hours ago [-]
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?
selfhoster1312 12 hours ago [-]
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.
Barrin92 12 hours ago [-]
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.
p-e-w 16 hours ago [-]
> If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs.
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.
kurante 15 hours ago [-]
> Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
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.
kurante 13 hours ago [-]
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.
p-e-w 12 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
There was a vote at the annual general meeting where all members could attend and vote.
colordrops 11 hours ago [-]
"community led" != "ideology". That's a statement of governance style, which is a different level.
rvz 15 hours ago [-]
> 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).
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
colordrops 14 hours ago [-]
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.
hbbio 16 hours ago [-]
Another beauty of free software is they took the project from gitea and gogs before that.
cush 14 hours ago [-]
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
avaer 13 hours ago [-]
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.
selfhoster1312 12 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Literally every rule is decided by random popularity vibes. Name one that isn't?
omnimus 13 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
kurante 16 hours ago [-]
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?
> 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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
You know every project or collective used to have their own website and that was fine, right?
krapp 16 hours ago [-]
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.
mfru 13 hours ago [-]
They held an internal discussion amongst members and decided democratically which stance to take.
holgerschurig 14 hours ago [-]
> 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
TZubiri 13 hours ago [-]
I don't know what the actual stance is, and what counts as cryptocurrency or why the decision was made.
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.
> “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
Welp. Looks like I'm never going back there.
conartist6 16 hours ago [-]
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
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
How do you define "slop" ?
Barrin92 12 hours ago [-]
the same way United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined porn in Jacobellis v. Ohio, you know it when you see it
matheusmoreira 11 hours ago [-]
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?
yaemiko 3 hours ago [-]
perhaps wasn't your intent, but this clearly demonstrates the benefit of those kinds of rules for everybody around both on codeberg and here. and you're still here
conartist6 8 hours ago [-]
Ain't no point being proud of what you didn't do
matheusmoreira 2 hours ago [-]
It's not pride, it's disappointment in my fellow humans.
conartist6 16 hours ago [-]
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
iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 6 hours ago [-]
The real world (as in society) has labyrinthine processes and procedures, with multiple checks and balances, designed to ensure that justice is at least partially served. Codeberg appears to lack this.
And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.
But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.
inigyou 5 hours ago [-]
Has any enforcement action occurred based on new ToS yet?
iamnothere 5 hours ago [-]
Not to my knowledge, but without a structured framework for those decisions, I have little confidence that enforcement will remain fair and even-handed moving forward. I also suspect that the ambiguity of the “reputation” clause will be abused in the future.
stackghost 12 hours ago [-]
>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.
iamnothere 7 hours ago [-]
Fortunately, some of us have this cool thing called intelligence, which allows us to build unique spaces that have different rules from the norm.
conartist6 5 hours ago [-]
I love that way of thinking, but for me it's not intelligence but rather philosophy, community, and care (three things LLMs can mimic, but ultimately lack to an even greater degree than they lack intelligence)
stackghost 3 hours ago [-]
Indeed it's almost like open source projects can use their collective intelligence and decide for themselves what's acceptable and what's not acceptable when it comes to free git hosting, irrespective of "the norm".
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
> 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.
conartist6 14 hours ago [-]
...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
davkan 13 hours ago [-]
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.
nasretdinov 10 hours ago [-]
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.
il-b 7 hours ago [-]
Crypto enables resistance to tyrannies in many parts of the world. It also provides a means of survival for oppressed groups.
jimbo_joe 8 hours ago [-]
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.
kamikazechaser 14 hours ago [-]
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.
Borgz 13 hours ago [-]
Can you provide any links regarding the Forgejo incident? I haven't heard about that.
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".
selfhoster1312 12 hours ago [-]
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.
tkel 13 hours ago [-]
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.
vlugorilla 14 hours ago [-]
That's it. I'm leaving Codeberg. Feels like if European Union was turned into a code forge.
FireInsight 11 hours ago [-]
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.
PeterStuer 13 hours ago [-]
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.
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
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.
conartist6 16 hours ago [-]
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
matheusmoreira 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
conartist6 16 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 15 hours ago [-]
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?
conartist6 15 hours ago [-]
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
whilenot-dev 13 hours ago [-]
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?
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
archagon 12 hours ago [-]
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.
matheusmoreira 12 hours ago [-]
"Chuds" ?
fodkodrasz 14 hours ago [-]
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.
archagon 12 hours ago [-]
Oh, really? And what uncomfortable truths have you been slinging?
RamblingCTO 11 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Was it less fragmented when everyone had their own website?
RamblingCTO 7 hours ago [-]
Even then you had IRC, BB etc.
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Each group had their own ones. IRC started with one big network but was fragmented by channel. BBs were always very decentralised.
RamblingCTO 6 hours ago [-]
I know, that's not what I'm arguing. Fragmented != walled garden
adithyassekhar 16 hours ago [-]
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.
innocent_name 17 hours ago [-]
Social signaling, surprise surprise!
poisonborz 11 hours ago [-]
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.
zx8080 17 hours ago [-]
> 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.
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
Yes it's called the general assembly of codeberg eV (the non-profit). Members can vote, they have the power.
abc42 13 hours ago [-]
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.
ninjahawk1 17 hours ago [-]
This is a battle that likely shouldn’t be handled as a war on crypto, simply change the wording of your TOS. Absolutely nuclear.
natas 16 hours ago [-]
This is a slippery slope, and I will stay away from Codeberg, because who knows what they'll ban next.
tkel 14 hours ago [-]
And that's a slippery slope fallacy.
FabCH 14 hours ago [-]
They banned all LLM assisted projects.
It’s not a fallacy if it actually happened.
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
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 ».
FabCH 8 hours ago [-]
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.
joegibbs 13 hours ago [-]
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?
egorfine 11 hours ago [-]
This is incredible, really. A code hosting service started as a safe haven from US political tantrums now itself became even more political.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Name an online service that is not political
VortexLain 10 hours ago [-]
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.
llama123 12 hours ago [-]
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
Lerc 17 hours ago [-]
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.
jadar 17 hours ago [-]
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."
Marha01 15 hours ago [-]
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.
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
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)
rwz 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah, I'm not interested in a service that makes their product decisions based on the political hot button issue of the day. Was it only yesterday when they decided to ban "vibecoded" projects? Nobody in comments had a clear idea on what exactly the definition of "vibecoded" is, so half of the discussion was just confusion.
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
reassess_blind 11 hours ago [-]
I bet Microsoft loves that these GitHub competitors shoot themselves in the foot so often.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
What is a "GitHub competitor"?
arjie 12 hours ago [-]
Seems fine to me. It’s just a Bluesky version of GitHub. That was always going to do various odd bans.
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
_nhh 13 hours ago [-]
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.
selfhoster1312 12 hours ago [-]
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)
Heliodex 17 hours ago [-]
I get "Access denied" when trying to access. Can anyone archive?
Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/
wewewedxfgdf 17 hours ago [-]
Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.
spacechild1 10 hours ago [-]
Codeberg is not a company.
jMyles 7 hours ago [-]
Codeberg being transparent about having a political bent - which all projects do even if they claim not to - is fine. Wonderful even.
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
sandebert 12 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
There is one. It's called Forgejo
biznickman 14 hours ago [-]
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".
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
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.
mostlyRice 16 hours ago [-]
Seems like it's not for me, gotta move elsewhere.
KronisLV 12 hours ago [-]
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.
andunie 17 hours ago [-]
Didn't they do this a while ago already?
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
The discussion has been going on for years, but apparently the formal vote and terms of service change took place recently.
lifthrasiir 17 hours ago [-]
Apparently in early this month.
letmevoteplease 17 hours ago [-]
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.
bringfiregames 16 hours ago [-]
The Onion needs to parody these recent decisions "Codeberg bans any code base hosted on Codeberg for violating ToS" lol
ares623 17 hours ago [-]
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.
Panzerschrek 14 hours ago [-]
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.
11 hours ago [-]
maxdo 12 hours ago [-]
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
Retr0id 10 hours ago [-]
Not just cryptocurrency projects, cryptocurrency related projects. But hey, it's their space.
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Probably figuring they can afford their own git hosting and don't need charity.
fragmede 10 hours ago [-]
If I got some library that I wrote that a cryptocurrency decides is useful to it, do I get kicked off the platform?
fzeroracer 17 hours ago [-]
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.
protocolture 16 hours ago [-]
Probably would have been better to do this before the moral outrage had moved on to AI. Now it just seems pointless.
jdw64 17 hours ago [-]
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.
> “ 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
newsomix9xl 17 hours ago [-]
Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
qiqitori 17 hours ago [-]
Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.
a34729t 17 hours ago [-]
from your lips to gods ear!
add-sub-mul-div 17 hours ago [-]
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.
tbrownaw 16 hours ago [-]
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.
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
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.
sirnicolaz 7 hours ago [-]
Lol, since when Crypto == PoW. Ignorants
q8zd3 17 hours ago [-]
Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
They don't want side projects. They aren't a git dump. They want actual projects.
q8zd3 9 hours ago [-]
Is that criteria clear in their platform?
6 hours ago [-]
inigyou 6 hours ago [-]
Not entirely, but I think between the lines yes. They have a 100MB combined limit each person's non-promoted (i.e. not a serious project) repositories.
pluc 9 hours ago [-]
Now ban AI
globular-toast 13 hours ago [-]
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?
inigyou 10 hours ago [-]
Because we didn't understand that bankers are emergent behavior
akimbostrawman 4 hours ago [-]
fundamental issues like no fungibility or privacy. if you want a crypto currency that btc was supposed to be and people think it is, use xmr monero.
rvz 17 hours ago [-]
If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.
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.
notabotiswear 15 hours ago [-]
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.
jrflowers 15 hours ago [-]
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
cmrdporcupine 17 hours ago [-]
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.
pamcake 9 hours ago [-]
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.
cmrdporcupine 8 hours ago [-]
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.
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
I'm strongly anti-AI, but i upvoted your comment because it's the most reasonable one (in opposition to the AI ban) i've read so far. I haven't read those mastodon threads, but that sounds like a weird discourse. Are they from codeberg eV members or random passers-by (like me)? Would you mind sharing some links to some of those resources?
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912"You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look.""Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Both those threads have other examples, and there are plenty more other threads like them. It has the smell of a smug in group that allows no dissent.
I am also 80% certain there were comments on the PR (https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253) along similar lines that were removed but I have no backups or screenshots to backup that accusation.
awllau 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
em1sar 9 hours ago [-]
[dead]
andrewflnr 16 hours ago [-]
I allowed myself to believe that the public conversation had moved past the "free speech means that no one is allowed to control what others post on platforms they run". The obvious cases of it routinely get replies with the obvious counterarguments, so I thought maybe everyone had gotten the idea. Apparently not.
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
nixosbestos 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
heiogalma 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cyberax 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
Crunchified 17 hours ago [-]
Blockchain is no good?
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
You can buy drugs with it
cyberax 17 hours ago [-]
Exactly my point.
Cider9986 15 hours ago [-]
Monero protects privacy online, a human right.
cyberax 15 hours ago [-]
Very important when you pay for ransomware.
Cider9986 14 hours ago [-]
The vast majority of crime happens in fiat, not crypto. Monero protects human rights while fiat allows them to be taken away.
For example, Canadian govt used banks to control peaceful protesters to deny them freedom of expression. If they used Monero they wouldn't have had their rights violated.
cyberax 14 hours ago [-]
The percentage of classical fiat used for crime is negligible, when compared with the percentage of blockhain fiat used for crimes.
Moreover, classical fiat makes steps to make crime like ransomware or kidnapping impractical. While crypto fiat works on making them easy
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
>The percentage of classical fiat used for crime is negligible, when compared with the percentage of blockhain fiat used for crimes.
If the goal is to prevent crime then going after a currency based on percentage is stupid. Nobody cares about what percent, they care about what's actually happening and that's where the astronomically larger amount of fiat crime matters.
>Moreover, classical fiat makes steps to make crime like ransomware or kidnapping impractical. While crypto fiat works on making them easy
You're right regular transparent crypto is problematic because it makes kidnapping more common. That's why everyone should use privacy coins like Monero because they don't want to go shouting their bank account balance and every purchase they've ever made every time they make a purchase.
We shouldn't spy on everyone to prevent crime, that's like putting everyone in jail and making them prove they are good people to get out or making people accused of committing a crime forced to prove their innocence beyond doubt.
Monero prevents mass surveillance which makes our society more free.
cyberax 2 hours ago [-]
> Nobody cares about what percent, they care about what's actually happening and that's where the astronomically larger amount of fiat crime matters.
I absolutely care. Classical money system has regulations that make crime like ransomware or (physical) kidnapping impractical. Cryptocrap enables them. The entire ransomware field became possible _just_ because of it.
> Monero prevents mass surveillance which makes our society more free.
Hell no. Monero and other cryptocrap so far produced Trump, enabled CSAM, enabled North Korea to bypass sanctions, and so on.
They did not increase freedom for anybody but criminals. Go on, list the positive outcomes enabled by cryptocrap that are at least commensurate with its harm. I'll wait.
Cider9986 32 minutes ago [-]
If you don't care about privacy, then state your address, bank account balance, phone number, family members, and post photos of the inside of your house. Monero protects some of that information.
It's a human right to choose what information to reveal about yourself.
Crypto is not crap on the whole. Many coins are worthless and scams, but some improves payments and give people more freedom and privacy. Just like everything, understanding crypto requires nuance.
Of course any privacy tool will first be challenged by the bad actors caught using it. That's just the way it goes and is the same with Tor, secure devices like GrapheneOS. But we shouldn't take away peoples rights because of a few bad actors.
There's a vast ecosystem of legal services that accept and use Monero like Mullvad VPN and many listed on donatemonero.org.
Monero prevents ransomware because it prevents others from knowing how much you have. I agree that regular transparent crypto is problematic because of that lack of privacy which enables bad actors like kidnappers or oppressive governments. Monero is an important iteration on transparent crypto. There's a reason one of the "rules" of Monero" is never say how much you have.
I've made 100s of Monero transactions and none of them have been for illicit goods or any crime. They just were for protecting my privacy.
We've banned this account. Please don't register accounts for the purpose of taunting people and posting ideological rhetoric and flamebait. THe guidelines are clear that this is not what HN is for.
When it's your website you can decide what goes on it. Centralised services were so last decade.
asah 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
grigio 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
OuterVale 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
fishgoesblub 17 hours ago [-]
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?
inigyou 12 hours ago [-]
I thought the government already made those languages illegal
inigyou 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
selfhoster1312 11 hours ago [-]
> 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.
pamcake 9 hours ago [-]
Will you eat your hat? It's not that far from many seemingly popular takes I see on fediverse regularly.
heiogalma 17 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
glerk 17 hours ago [-]
Codeberg can ban whatever they want on their platform. The thing is nobody cares about codeberg, and this is probably just a publicity stunt.
krapp 16 hours ago [-]
Clearly some people do care about Codeberg given how much palpitating outrage there is in this very thread.
glerk 16 hours ago [-]
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.
gverrilla 16 hours ago [-]
The stunt angle might make sense, but banning vibe code too kinda contradicts it.
krapp 6 hours ago [-]
Codeberg already has a reputation for being "woke" so any traction with the HN crowd would surprise me.
wolvesechoes 14 hours ago [-]
Good, based. We need some pesticide.
jaredcwhite 14 hours ago [-]
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.
tancop 10 hours ago [-]
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.
shikck200 17 hours ago [-]
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.
hackinthebochs 17 hours ago [-]
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?
loeg 17 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 17 hours ago [-]
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.
shikck200 13 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 7 hours ago [-]
> Why would P2P/E2EE software be banned?
Chat Control 2.0? Public pressure campaigns against encryption? The mob decides that it’s “fascist” to prevent snooping?
> Thats not really a "thing".
WikiLeaks and SecureDrop would disagree.
> Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Yes, and I’m saying that this is a bad thing. Obviously there may be limited means to contest legal actions (outside of decentralization), but GitHub has been iffy regarding ToS applications in the past.
loeg 16 hours ago [-]
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.
iamnothere 16 hours ago [-]
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?
loeg 6 hours ago [-]
I think Codeberg should do whatever they want; I'm not involved.
cute_boi 17 hours ago [-]
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.
DaSHacka 16 hours ago [-]
"The only good thing about crypto is using it for <entire reason crypto exists>"
Well, sounds like it is a successful technology.
hparadiz 14 hours ago [-]
That got a hearty laugh out of me.
shikck200 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Cider9986 15 hours ago [-]
Monero is digital cash and protects privacy, a human right.
shikck200 13 hours ago [-]
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.
Cider9986 3 hours ago [-]
>You mean X gives Y 100 bucks in cash privacy?
Yes. Monero is the equivalent of spending cash online. Any service that accepts monero still has order numbers to deliver the product. Or requires an address if it must be shipped.
It's about minimizing unnecessary data.
fwn 9 hours ago [-]
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.
spaceman_2020 17 hours ago [-]
You can say the same for AI btw
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
rvz 16 hours ago [-]
> 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.
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.
StrontiumK9 11 hours ago [-]
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.
intunderflow 10 hours ago [-]
Oh good, my mistake in not knowing what the tag meant
> 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
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.
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
Then you would have been a supporting member, and had the opportunity to vote on this decision.
This isn't very cool of you.
Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.
Germany doesn't have a "Freedom of Speech" first amendment. As far as I know that is endemic to the US.
If you dislike their stance you can host your cryptocurrency scam elsewhere, there is no shortage of git hosting services.
Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services. No big deal right? After all they can just go somewhere else. No, clearly this is not reasonable. But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
HN has rules. I can be banned if I violate them.
It seems this very site does not uphold the free speech principle all that much.
> Maybe we should campaign to ban all left-wing aligned projects from all major git hosting services.
Sure, if it suits them. Fine by me. I believe in freedom of association.
There are some limitations for certain public services to avoid discrimination and segregation, but apart for that, I don't care.
In fact, I host my own Gitea instance for my private projects.
> But I say this to demonstrate that your ability operate in society at large depends on the same principle of free speech that you do not extend to others.
It absolutely does not. Speech was not completely free in any country I lived in, and society worked out fine.
There is a degree of freedom within the democratic framework of those countries, but there are absolutely rules limiting speech. And it is fine, societies are all about compromises.
No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
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.
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
Which is a waste of energy.
Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”
EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
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).
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.
What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/
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.
Assuming that people that use blockchains are not principled is similar to assuming that people that use arrays are not principled.
Maybe more ridiculous, as you're supporting banks, card companies, and money transfer providers taking 1-6% of everyone's transactions.
Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').
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
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.
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.)
Well I suppose that's also technically true of governments...
Hyper-productive people are often volatile. Putting up with it is a necessary tradeoff, as the systems they produce often fill a niche that nobody else will serve adequately.
Drew I think is just kind of a dick who has a history of putting his personal crusades before delivering a product people want. I remember a few years back sourcehut being reported as unstable and he went and lashed out at people who were complaining to him about it instead of fixing the issues. And he banned crypto projects cause he doesn't like them, at least Codeberg held it to a vote.
Patrick Volkerding is a pretty stable guy, I think he's the model more BDFLs should strive to be.
I think Drew suffers a little from lack of focus. I greatly appreciate his work on Harelang, sway, and aerc for instance, but these are quite far from his Sourcehut work. (I can see how aerc and Sourcehut dovetail with the plaintext email focus, at least.)
Anecdotally I’ve come across a number of smaller crates in the Rust ecosystem that store their code there. Usually European devs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhGrk8dp91M
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.
> > 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...
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.
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.
Taking a stance does not mean you adopted an "us vs. them" mentality.
What a bonkers generalization.
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
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.
One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.
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.
There are also systems that exist between “legally mandated voting” and “whoever shows up”.
You could even set different thresholds based on the importance of the issue! (Decisions like ToS changes would seem to be quite important.)
I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.
The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.
An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.
Working 40 hours a week is a political number.
Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.
I 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.
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
But the GPs comment blamed Mastodon as a whole for allowing the possibility of admin abuse, which isn't substantially different from HN.
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.
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.
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.
It was ever thus except when we remember.
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.
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.
The position that everything is political so therefore opinions are mandatory intentionally conflates these things.
> 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.
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.
What you seem to be arguing for is seat-of-the-pants reactive mob governance. Functional communities and societies don’t work that way.
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.
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.
Some practical questions have an obvious political dimension, in which case it’s fair to consider that component, but people will often argue over whether the question is “political enough” to justify debate. To deal with this, you need processes to ensure that debate is contained but not overly restricted on this kind of issue.
Making every question political is a trick right out of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Whether to pay the hosting bill shouldn’t be a political question. Whether to change hosts may or may not be, depending on the reasoning.
>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.
But just for the sake of argument I'll grant it and amend my statement: What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on irrelevant political issues. A cat shelter doesn't need to have an official position on abortion to function, and in all likelihood having one would be counter to its purposes.
But which questions are apolitical questions, is itself a political question.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
You’re welcome to host it at your own venue. Or , I guess, to keep whining that you’re not being given free services by someone who dislikes your work.
>Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort
in the current year, that's a massive red flag.
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
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.
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!
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.
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".
https://join.codeberg.org/
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.
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.
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
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.
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).
You can't make large changes like this without undermining your viability as stable infrastructure.
It's a simple rule: "no cryptocurrency projects".
If it was just one guy who arbitrarily decided as such, that's not much of a 'process' and is exactly what GP was calling out.
At this point any project that’s even vaguely controversial ought to be looking at fully decentralized solutions like Radicle.
“Don’t be an AI bro”
“Don’t be a Russian”
“Don’t be a fascist”
“Don’t be an antisemite”
“Don’t be a (insert boogeyman here)”
“Don’t be a sympathizer”
“Don’t be an enemy of the state”
These words are manipulations, and they will eventually catch up with you.
Agreed. No way I will ever use Codeberg from now on.
Currency is a measure of social trust; it allows social contributions to be measured in a fungible unit. Cryptocurrencies erase this concept of social trust under the purported claim that anonymous transfer of “money” is good for society, forgetting why humans created currency in the first place. Anonymity abets money laundering, illicit drug trade, human trafficking/slavery, and CSAM, along with a raft of other antisocial behaviors.
Yes, you can do all of the above with USD, but you’ll have to put a lot more effort into doing so. Hence, it is fair to lump the bad in with the good for crypto (IMO) because it’s unclear how the benefits of crypto outweigh the antisocial behavior it enables. What has society gained in return?
> What has society gained in return?
A currency technology that doesn't rely on central authority, slavery nor imperialism to exist.
Going even further, cryptcurrencies, being distrusted ledgers, still fulfill the ability to test for someone "social trust" within a transaction, anonymous or not. Also, it's not like we, as the whole society, have access to your transaction history at all times with USD (which we do with Bitcoin, funnily enough).
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
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.
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)
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.
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
> 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...
Are they though? I see "We are more than just Git hosting: Our community is ..." right in the highlight box on their landing page.
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?
They are not trying to run an inclusive service.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
Very similar things can be said about VPNs. Seeing only the bad to justify banning an entire category is terrible.
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.
Oh, honey...
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.
Germans democratically elected Hitler. A vote by less than 500 randoms means less than nothing.
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
I don't see what it has to do with Codeberg though.
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'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.
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.
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
It's political, inherently, but it's not "only" political, or it's not necessarily political on the part of the host. As in, most practical hosts _have_ to obey US IP law. They don't _have_ to ban crypto or LLMs. The former only inconveniences or restricts me insofar as the host is unwilling to go to prison. The latter on their whims or personal views.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
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.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
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.
> 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).
The ToS change grammar could do with tightening up as well.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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
And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.
HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.
Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?
> 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.
Wow so they banned literally everything?
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.
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.
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/#...
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!
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?
I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
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.
* - 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.
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
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!
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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).
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
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.
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.
It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
404, oh no! Better never use github!
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
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
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?
To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value
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.
And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.
But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
If you don't see the politics behind economic actors, i would recommend taking a closer look.
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
[0]: https://lobste.rs/~matheusmoreira
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.
Lobsters will probably be fine.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
But this (and especially the AI ban) is a big red flag and I'm steering clear from Codeberg.
It’s not a fallacy if it actually happened.
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.
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
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.
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
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)
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
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)
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/
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
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.
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.
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
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
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.
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.
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
> “ 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
Cryptoberg or whatever.
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.
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
subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
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.
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
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.
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 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.
https://scholar.social/@silvermoon82@wandering.shop/11696402... "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Both those threads have other examples, and there are plenty more other threads like them. It has the smell of a smug in group that allows no dissent.
I am also 80% certain there were comments on the PR (https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253) along similar lines that were removed but I have no backups or screenshots to backup that accusation.
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
For example, Canadian govt used banks to control peaceful protesters to deny them freedom of expression. If they used Monero they wouldn't have had their rights violated.
Moreover, classical fiat makes steps to make crime like ransomware or kidnapping impractical. While crypto fiat works on making them easy
If the goal is to prevent crime then going after a currency based on percentage is stupid. Nobody cares about what percent, they care about what's actually happening and that's where the astronomically larger amount of fiat crime matters.
>Moreover, classical fiat makes steps to make crime like ransomware or kidnapping impractical. While crypto fiat works on making them easy
You're right regular transparent crypto is problematic because it makes kidnapping more common. That's why everyone should use privacy coins like Monero because they don't want to go shouting their bank account balance and every purchase they've ever made every time they make a purchase.
We shouldn't spy on everyone to prevent crime, that's like putting everyone in jail and making them prove they are good people to get out or making people accused of committing a crime forced to prove their innocence beyond doubt.
Monero prevents mass surveillance which makes our society more free.
I absolutely care. Classical money system has regulations that make crime like ransomware or (physical) kidnapping impractical. Cryptocrap enables them. The entire ransomware field became possible _just_ because of it.
> Monero prevents mass surveillance which makes our society more free.
Hell no. Monero and other cryptocrap so far produced Trump, enabled CSAM, enabled North Korea to bypass sanctions, and so on.
They did not increase freedom for anybody but criminals. Go on, list the positive outcomes enabled by cryptocrap that are at least commensurate with its harm. I'll wait.
It's a human right to choose what information to reveal about yourself.
Crypto is not crap on the whole. Many coins are worthless and scams, but some improves payments and give people more freedom and privacy. Just like everything, understanding crypto requires nuance.
Of course any privacy tool will first be challenged by the bad actors caught using it. That's just the way it goes and is the same with Tor, secure devices like GrapheneOS. But we shouldn't take away peoples rights because of a few bad actors.
There's a vast ecosystem of legal services that accept and use Monero like Mullvad VPN and many listed on donatemonero.org.
Monero prevents ransomware because it prevents others from knowing how much you have. I agree that regular transparent crypto is problematic because of that lack of privacy which enables bad actors like kidnappers or oppressive governments. Monero is an important iteration on transparent crypto. There's a reason one of the "rules" of Monero" is never say how much you have.
I've made 100s of Monero transactions and none of them have been for illicit goods or any crime. They just were for protecting my privacy.
Just delete the comment if you're going to do that.
Because it set off a horrendous flamewar subthread, containing not a single substantive comment.
> Just delete the comment if you're going to do that.
We don't delete comments unilaterally. We made it clear where it was detached from so people could find the context if they wanted to.
You're welcome to post another reply that is not so clearly in breach of the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> Software that gets used to leak state secrets?
Thats not really a "thing". If someone uploads something of the sorts, it probably going to be taken down. VPNs follow the same rules as P2P/E2EE, and has nothing to do with crypto.
Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Chat Control 2.0? Public pressure campaigns against encryption? The mob decides that it’s “fascist” to prevent snooping?
> Thats not really a "thing".
WikiLeaks and SecureDrop would disagree.
> Just look at github, they have taken down multiple repos during the years that are illegal, and/or breaks their TOS.
Yes, and I’m saying that this is a bad thing. Obviously there may be limited means to contest legal actions (outside of decentralization), but GitHub has been iffy regarding ToS applications in the past.
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?
Well, sounds like it is a successful technology.
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.
Yes. Monero is the equivalent of spending cash online. Any service that accepts monero still has order numbers to deliver the product. Or requires an address if it must be shipped.
It's about minimizing unnecessary data.
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.
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
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...
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.