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?
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'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
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
I strongly disagree: I think this is a perfectly acceptable action. No project is entitled to host their project there, nor is any project compelled to do so, so I don't see why there is any harm in having this instance of Forgejo moderate itself as it sees fit. They have no moral requirement to support all kinds of software.
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
> No project is entitled to host their project there
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
Let this be a reminder to never trust any service be it one ran by a billion dollar company, to one ran by volunteers. You will be eventually screwed over. Make backup plans, and self-host whatever you can so nothing can be taken from you. For Git forges, I personally recommend Gitea[1], or Forgejo[2] (a Gitea fork by Codeberg)
Self-hosting based on an external project is still a dependency on Someone Else to keep it up to date, unless you have both the time and skill to take over maintenance of that project.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
This is an interesting development. I think for the forseeable future, more and more people (who run and/or own products or platforms like Codeberg) will continue to be more selective on what they accept on their platforms.
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
It's a 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Wow. I have never worked on any cryptocurrency projects and never intend to, but I will certainly be staying very far away from Codeberg because of this.
There are some levels of censorship that make sense for a code forge - “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”, etc. But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software sends the message that this isn’t a safe place to host any of your repositories. If the moral landscape shifts in the future, how can you be sure your project won’t be next on the chopping block?
What a terrible precedent to set.
They banned cypto projects two weeks ago. Today they banned vibecoded projects. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
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'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
Welp. Looks like I'm never going back there.
I mean, that's your right, but also they'll get new users too. So much of the internet is drowning in slop that any place that's still brimming with original content will likely see its stock go up, and will tend to attract people who still do original work, creating a virtuous cycle
I strongly disagree: I think this is a perfectly acceptable action. No project is entitled to host their project there, nor is any project compelled to do so, so I don't see why there is any harm in having this instance of Forgejo moderate itself as it sees fit. They have no moral requirement to support all kinds of software.
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
> No project is entitled to host their project there
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
Another beauty of free software is they took the project from gitea and gogs before that.
> But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
Why yes, in fact I am. One of the major reasons [1] I switched to GrapheneOS.
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
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.
“Nobody ever got fired buying IBM.”
[delayed]
Why? Banning abuse is fine, and disliking Cryptocurrency projects at a moral level is fine, but running a coffee hosting service and putting your moral judgements on projects like this just seems childish and unserious.
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
In the words of the person who announced the ban, when moderating a discussion on it 8 months prior:[1]
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
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.
> 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.
The whole "codeberg is political" is the scary bit. Whose politics? How is it decided by members what exact politics to represent? Do some members have undue influence on exerting their particular politics?
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
I think you're misunderstanding "codeberg is political".
Everything is political, FOSS is political, GitHub is also political.
When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.
No 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.
Honestly I respect it
I can't. What happened to pluralism?
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
GitHub is the worst place to host your code. Except for all of the other places.
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.
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.
Evidence disagrees.
My self hosted gitforge disagrees.
So it seems.
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.
> Why?
The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.
The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.
It's the lack of attention to detail that bugs me. It's just bad policy making. Writing good policies that encourage the right behaviour and discourage the wrong behaviour, policies that promote a good culture, are HARD.
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
I'm also banned from the site for some reason despite never having been there before. Though I suspect my IP is on someone's naughty list for some reason seeing as I get far more captchas on the internet than I feel I should be getting.
https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-checker.php is pretty handy for checking if you're on any of the major blocklists.
They also want to ban 'AI slop' - I'd love to see how they draw the lines on that one.
Policing what can and can't be hosted is the opposite of freedom, it's tyranny.
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.
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.
They are not the first code hosting service to do so. sourcehut banned cryptocurrency in 2022:
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use
Mostly positive HN discussion when this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403780
The difference is sourcehut has like 50 users
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.
In the prior words[1] of Gusted, one of the board members that announced the ban:
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
Pretending to run an inclusive git hosting service for FOSS and then attacking your own users because their code is the wrong type of algorithm isn't politics, it's just being an asshole.
Their own users voted for this.
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.
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.
[delayed]
"the community" being some tiny subset of busybodies out of an OOMs-larger body of users that don't want to be bothered?
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
iirc, it's a consumer co-op. So think of it as a vote of all users willing to pay for the membership to the service, who (correspondingly) are more likely to be power users/"activist" in the "activist investor" sense.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
Given that the actual number of paying users is probably low, it sounds like it would be relatively cheap to disrupt policy for someone with deep pockets.
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.
This sounds like a very dumb decision to you and I and most, but see you don't use codeberg. I don't use codeberg.
So it's totally fine to poke fun, and totally fine for them to do whatever they want. We aren't part of that community!
I think their own community can make their own rules. My only thought in doing so the description of what they represent would then be subject to those rules.
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
Let this be a reminder to never trust any service be it one ran by a billion dollar company, to one ran by volunteers. You will be eventually screwed over. Make backup plans, and self-host whatever you can so nothing can be taken from you. For Git forges, I personally recommend Gitea[1], or Forgejo[2] (a Gitea fork by Codeberg)
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
Self-hosting based on an external project is still a dependency on Someone Else to keep it up to date, unless you have both the time and skill to take over maintenance of that project.
I’m using self hosted GitLab; any reason I should check out something else?
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
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.
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.
there's decentralized git on Nostr:
https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/
Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.
Git over Reticulum is another option. You get git, issue tracking (work documents), release management
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
GIT IS DECENTRALIZED
But the identity part of git is not (unless you count pgp signing of each commit, which never took off at a large scale)
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
Issue tracking and collaboration tools are not. (Although many small projects could get by with a todo.txt and a mailing list.)
But if you just hashed all the changes and put them in Merkle tree to verify, wouldn't that make it so much better?
Yup, but the community you build around a project is not.
Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.
That's fair.
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
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.
Does Google or Microsoft do that?
Google/Microsoft offer services in exchange for money. They are not tax exempt charities purporting to do beneficial work for society to earn that status. And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
> And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
Oh, honey...
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.
Relatedly, Codeberg has also banned vibe-coded projects.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
Well there go my repos.
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.
The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg. The fact that they have ideological commitments that make them think banning cryptocurrency projects is a good idea is a separate good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
Banning cryptocurrency scams seems like a pretty good reason to use codeberg.
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.
> The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
Yes, and people should think about this much more than they do, when it comes to more popular services that also make ideological decisions about what user content to disallow.
Yes, BUT there's a difference between holding the power and actually using it to enforce ideological positions.
and there's a difference between a monopolized market player doing it and a hole-in-the-wall free host.
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.
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.
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.
What exactly about "how it was done" is alarming to you?
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 follows what SourceHut did in 2022 [1], but I think SourceHut did much better job to announce that (as of this writing).
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
Yes, Drew did a much better job managing this, and his reasoning was more excusable (people were using the build system to mine crypto and eating up resources). I still don’t like it, but I get it, and at least it was handled professionally.
> 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.
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."
This is a good thing. Crypto is 95% scams, and the remaining 5% just WAY too risky for the normal-joe. Overall, crypto (bitcoin specially) is just a useless energy consuming nightmare.
While that's true, it's unrelated to hosting code. A reliable code hosting site should be agnostic to content. Once they start making editorial decisions about what projects to host, why should anyone trust them with their project?
I just fundamentally disagree that hosting sites should be agnostic to content.
Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.
What about emulators? E2EE? P2P software? Software that gets used to leak state secrets? VPNs?
Once you open the door, it’s going to be really difficult to resist political pressure in other areas. The mob is easily swayed against new targets.
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.
You can say the same for AI btw
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
The Onion needs to parody these recent decisions "Codeberg bans any code base hosted on Codeberg for violating ToS" lol
I get "Access denied" when trying to access. Can anyone archive?
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260723015826/https://codeberg....
Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/
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.
This is a slippery slope, and I will stay away from Codeberg, because who knows what they'll ban next.
This is a battle that likely shouldn’t be handled as a war on crypto, simply change the wording of your TOS. Absolutely nuclear.
Seems like it's not for me, gotta move elsewhere.
Social signaling, surprise surprise!
Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.
Probably would have been better to do this before the moral outrage had moved on to AI. Now it just seems pointless.
Didn't they do this a while ago already?
Apparently in early this month.
Codeberg can ban whatever they want on their platform. The thing is nobody cares about codeberg, and this is probably just a publicity stunt.
Clearly some people do care about Codeberg given how much palpitating outrage there is in this very thread.
Yep, the outrage is the whole point of this marketing scheme.
I’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
The stunt angle might make sense, but banning vibe code too kinda contradicts it.
Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...
Related:
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
Who?
> “ Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”
Github still works, and the crypto ecosystem also has arweave and many others for static assets
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.
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.
Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.
from your lips to gods ear!
This is an interesting development. I think for the forseeable future, more and more people (who run and/or own products or platforms like Codeberg) will continue to be more selective on what they accept on their platforms.
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
It's a 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.
Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
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.
If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.
Err Codeberg bans vibe coded projects (150 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
That makes the decision to not use Codeberg even easier for many.
If you are after a sustainable and stable code repository to host your projects then Codeberg disqualified themselves. It goes down regularly as much as GitHub and loses to GitHub on discovery.
Now, you can potentially lose your entire account and projects by posting a repo that can have AI with auto-complete.
If Linus Torvalds (pro-AI) published his scuba-diving software [0] there, which there is a CLAUDE.md file in the repository, it would get banned.
[0] https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface
Alternative git hosting truly is a cottage industry of terrible ideas
When it's your website you can decide what goes on it. Centralised services were so last decade.
Seems fine to me. It was decided by a community vote; it's their site and their rules. The people complaining about those damn ideologicsts or whatever seem to be missing the point in that they are equally as ideological just in a different direction.
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
I 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
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.