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".
> 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.
I mean, that's your right, but also they'll get new users too. So much of the internet is drowning in slop that any place that's still brimming with original content will likely see its stock go up, and will tend to attract people who still do original work, creating a virtuous cycle
Yeah I don't know. It's impossible to draw a clear line, but the overall effect is not hard to identify. If your work supports a community and creates value, you can reasonably expect the community's support. If your work leeches from a community, you can reasonably expect the community to turn on you.
To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value
To me, this all sounds like the kind of fuzzy reasoning and nondescript language that turns communities into popularity contests and backstabbing competitions.
If Codeberg wants to put a flag up to draw in every programmer with a personality disorder, well that may be their right, but it’s not a good idea.
I'm... unsure how to feel. On one hand I have the utmost sympathy for the idea of pushing people away from disposable software and towards collaboration. On the other hand this will definitely devolve into name calling and vigilantism. On the third hand, Github is already drowning in slop. It takes up huuuuge amounts of resources and delivers a tiiiiny amount of value to the platform per line of slop code
You have to understand that this isn't about everyone being altruistic towards everyone else. When the industry declared that AI would replace humans, even perhaps make every single person worthless, they guaranteed beyond all doubt that the vitriol would reach at least these levels. There's no point in extending kindness to people whose stated goal is your extinction. At that point what's left is war.
Then war it is. Like I told the fine people of Lobsters, they're going to take out a lot of innocent people as collateral damage during their crusade. I've already soft quit that site, and there goes Codeberg as well. What can you do?
I don't disagree, but it is not within my power to do anything to change that. There exists no person who could call off the backlash to the AI movement
That's a controversial stance. The first statement of not using codeberg hosted projects to train LLMs makes sense. But to outright ban LLM coded projects seems just silly. If the problem is that users have too many vibe coded projects, then limiting the number of projects seems like a more reasonable stance. To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them. I get that this is being spun as an effort to save resources, but this is a pretty blunt way to accomplish this. And a great way to alienate a lot of potential users.
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
I 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!
> If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs.
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
> Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them
What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].
Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
> 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).
> No project is entitled to host their project there
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
Did they, though? Do we have numbers on how many cryptocurrency projects were removed from Codeberg because of this, since GitHub is the default choice? Or are you suggesting that there is going to be a significant split because of this?
I agree that this is probably going to cause some fragmentation, but I'm not convinced that it will do so in a meaningful matter or at the scale at which it is problematic to the free and open source ecosystem.
For what it's worth, Forgejo is working on federation[1], which might address your networking effect concerns?
Codeberg isn't competing against Github for market share, it serves a specific demographic with a specific ideology. Anyone is welcome to use any other host they want for their crypto and AI projects, with whatever policies align with their preferences. Or make your own with blackjack and hookers.
There shouldn't even be "default choices" or "huge network effects" in FOSS anyway. That's just another form of centralization.
My rule of thumb: just use the most mainstream options unless I have a very, very strong reason to do otherwise. The mainstream options will screw you, but the niche options will screw you in totally unexpected ways.
Are these comments written buy bots? It's the mainstream ones that have been screwing people without any recovery options, there were many horrifying top posts in hn itself in last few years.
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.
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.
Why? Banning abuse is fine, and disliking Cryptocurrency projects at a moral level is fine, but running a coffee hosting service and putting your moral judgements on projects like this just seems childish and unserious.
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
In the words of the person who announced the ban, when moderating a discussion on it 8 months prior:[1]
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
The whole "codeberg is political" is the scary bit. Whose politics? How is it decided by members what exact politics to represent? Do some members have undue influence on exerting their particular politics?
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
No, there's a big difference between "net effects are not guaranteed to be perfectly neutral" and "I am going to intentionally put my thumb on the scale".
The position that everything is political so therefore opinions are mandatory intentionally conflates these things.
My issue with this is not that codeberg and its members want to uphold a certain set of political beliefs. Any private organization is free to do that. It's that they haven't defined the rule that's supposed to encode those beliefs.
As written, the rule is a non-exhaustive example of "content that harms codeberg's reputation". Someone asked in the pr whether "cryptocurrency-related" is defined anywhere and it merged without an answer. The responses to wording concerns was essentially they will figure it out later. Moves like this don't fill me with confidence.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I guess that brings up the question of why do people use Codeberg in the first place. From what I understand, it's a decision based on values right rather than cost, functionality, or convenience. Well here you go, more values, enjoy!
I used it for a while because I write free software and Codeberg was aligned with that. I went back to GitHub because I couldn't get their CIs to work. Now that they banned "heavy LLM usage" I won't be going back there I guess.
I'm also banned from the site for some reason despite never having been there before. Though I suspect my IP is on someone's naughty list for some reason seeing as I get far more captchas on the internet than I feel I should be getting.
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.
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.
And has a very vocal/opinionated owner. You know what you're getting with Sourcehut. (And I don't mean that in a bad way).
Rightly or wrongly, Codeberg had a different feel. For a while it felt like it was trying to be a refuge from Github. But then again, maybe that was projecting something on them that they didn't intend.
Once again, the stability of a BDFL is vindicated.
Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros (Debian’s governance is slow but functional), but it seems to need guardrails around the process.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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).
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.
As with the AI ban this was a community decision done by a majority vote. It seems that most people commenting or writing articles in the last few days don't have a Codeberg account or never visit the forum.
iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
Given that the actual number of paying users is probably low, it sounds like it would be relatively cheap to disrupt policy for someone with deep pockets.
How is this a failure mode? Sounds like a good idea to me to let the members decide who they want in the club. Just wish this could also be done for national borders.
Codeberg is a community steered project. If participating isn't something you're interested in, it's probably not the right fit for you. There are other Forgejo hosts (you could even be one yourself) where you can be the king of your own castle.
I think their own community can make their own rules. My only thought in doing so the description of what they represent would then be subject to those rules.
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
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.
In the prior words[1] of Gusted, one of the board members that announced the ban:
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Pretending to run an inclusive git hosting service for FOSS and then attacking your own users because their code is the wrong type of algorithm isn't politics, it's just being an asshole.
Nope. It's not "attacking own user base". These comments are ridiculous now. It's safeguarding a open project by removing scammers and abusers that exploit it. Scammer should host their own or use github.
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
Google/Microsoft offer services in exchange for money. They are not tax exempt charities purporting to do beneficial work for society to earn that status. And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
Not really. I run a large community with a ban on AI and crypto, because those communities are usually incredibly spammy, toxic, and rude to other users (because they never cared about the community in the first place; only harvesting its users for their own gain.)
"No AI/Crypto" isn't a law, its a note for grifters at the door that their code probably won't be appreciated. Whether or not this is in the "spirit of open source", as some other users suggest is an ineffective target to focus on. This is just a community trying and succeeding at its core users thriving, which tend to be anti-AI/crypto and more interesting in long term community building over harvesting group members for gain. Will this stop all AI and crypto projects? Absolutely not. But it makes it a less desirable target when your code can be removed.
I don't really understand the handwringing from other members, especially considering 1. theyre not codeberg users 2. they skew positively on AI and crypto. Yall were never using codeberg, so why the concern trolling now?
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.
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)
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.
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.
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.
The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg. The fact that they have ideological commitments that make them think banning cryptocurrency projects is a good idea is a separate good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
Exactly, I will no longer be recommending Codeberg moving forward for the same reason I don’t recommend GitHub. Political risk is a real concern for the projects I most care about.
What projects do you think are too political? If you violated the GPL, and your project was taken down, how political is that?
It is political to have rules on a platform and enforce them now... but only if you don't personally like the outcome. Interesting stuff.
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.
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.
Yeah I pulled my projects today. I don't need some sanctimonious kid -- who was still in diapers the first time I was reading Marx -- to tell me they're Purer Than Me and get voted off the island because I touched my GPL'd projects code with a Forbidden Tool. That's the level of discourse I saw on the PR and associated Mastodon etc threads.
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.
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.
I'm not personally a fan of this move or the vibe coding rule. That being said, I genuinely wonder how many people complaining about the rule are personally affected. Seems weird to me to complain about a service setting its own rules when you don't engage with it or contribute to it.
They don't have to be affected to be worried. It's how it was done and possibilities of further bans that is worrisome.
I have small open source projects that I won't move to Codeberg ever now because I don't want to waste any mental energy pondering if I might get banned in the future.
For example I have a stock trading backtracking strategy test tool. Will they ban anything related to fintech in the future because it is deemed evil? I don't want to have to think about that.
Will they ban my crappy game macroing tool to automate some simple repetitive game actions because it is considered cheating or against some game ToS? I don't care and I don't want to have to care about a possible ban. It's a glorified auto clicker to prevent RSI health issues ffs.
Crypto shills have alot of money and bots to push their agenda. Issue is the community is so toxic and scammy at this point it might be more disliked than AI slop by anyone with a pulse.
Publishing platforms’ censorship policies affect readers because they affect discovery and decide, like a parent, what you should or should not be allowed to read.
This is a good thing. Crypto is 95% scams, and the remaining 5% just WAY too risky for the normal-joe. Overall, crypto (bitcoin specially) is just a useless energy consuming nightmare.
While that's true, it's unrelated to hosting code. A reliable code hosting site should be agnostic to content. Once they start making editorial decisions about what projects to host, why should anyone trust them with their project?
I just fundamentally disagree that hosting sites should be agnostic to content.
Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.
Yes? Every hosting provider should be considering what they want to host. Of course it's fine for providers to take some sort of speech maximalism stance if they want to, but it is also reasonable not to.
So you think Codeberg should not host projects in the categories I listed?
Or if you think they should, should they also provide guarantees to projects that the rules will not be suddenly changed, disrupting the project and community?
If not, and you’re a developer, why would you want to host there?
The only good thing about crypto is we can send money easily to stupid countries without any hassle and crazy forex exchange. Other than that, i don't see any value in crypto.
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.
Codeberg's paying members can off course vote on policies of their own non-profit. More power to them. You have the freedom to not use their service. There are ample alternatives.
I'm not sure how this interacts with open source principles. I think they are free to do whatever they want with their own website and indeed with open source tooling, but as a host for open source it could conceivably conflict with those principles.
A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.
More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.
I mean that's how I personally would define ethical. But anytime someone makes a claim like that, you have to ask "by what standard." And it's usually just "me."
Personally this makes me glad I moved to Tangled rather than Codeberg. I don't know how this will be enforced, but I'd be scared of similar things happening in the future to something I'm working on and all the strife that could come with the sudden removal.
For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.
Makes me wonder if all non memory safe code will be on the chopping block in the next 5 years. Will they find it morally justifiable to "protect" people from evil unsafe languages?
If the government can put the mayor of NYC on a list of communist Cuban terrorists (it did, yesterday) it can ban anyone from anything for any reason. Better be prepared.
Not hosting a project lead by an actual racist and fascist is fine by me. I don't understand this. Can't/don't they use GitHub? (MS famously loves helping ICE, so they're perfect matches).
If nobody will host a racist piece of shit and he was forced to step back, maybe the RoR community would actually be healthier. But they still have all the usual forges.
This behavior all reads a lot like a guy going to a fundraiser for breast cancer and then getting upset that nobody is talking about type 2 diabetes. AI and Crypto engineers have a multiple huge platforms to collaborate - let people who wish to be separated from that environment of toxicity have their own too.
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.
Oh no, where ever shall the humble crypto/ai user post their code now. Codeberg was the last software forge that accepted crypto project hosting! Oh wait, sorry. Every other commonly used forge doesn't care.
HN loves to preach democracy until a platform governs itself in a way they disagree with.
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
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.
It's a shame that such a film of commercial and criminal slime surrounds big new technologies like crypto/AI that could otherwise be used for net good. But this is where we're at.
It's the whole world. It's the current zeitgeist. Everything is for money extraction and everyone is a resource whose money is to be extracted. Anyone who tries to resist will quickly be moneyless, then homeless, then foodless, then dead. Resistance is futile.
Commercial and criminal activity are not actually the same.
Also commercial activity tends to happen when everyone involved in the activity comes out ahead, so placing it as opposed to "net good" is perhaps a bit dubious.
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.
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.
This is far less controversial than their anti-AI stance which passed today.
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
I can't believe I want to make a comment that includes the phrase "virtue signaling" but here we are. (Also, based on my CI (with codeberg.org deps), maybe they should worry about uptime...)
Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.
edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?
> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground
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".
> 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.
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.
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
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.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
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!
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...
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
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).
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.
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.
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...
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh
I'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 banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce 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.
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
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.
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.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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!
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
> 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 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...
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
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.
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
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.
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
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
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
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.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
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/
I’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.
This behavior all reads a lot like a guy going to a fundraiser for breast cancer and then getting upset that nobody is talking about type 2 diabetes. AI and Crypto engineers have a multiple huge platforms to collaborate - let people who wish to be separated from that environment of toxicity have their own too.
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.
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
HN loves to preach democracy until a platform governs itself in a way they disagree with.
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
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.
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.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
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
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
I 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.
Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.
edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?
> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground