Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects(codeberg.org) |
Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects(codeberg.org) |
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
Self-hosting classic forge is great but does require domain name and infra with uptime. These p2p solutions are more like bittorrent where you can clone as long as someone is seeding and git already has commit signature as building block for trust.
I was already hosting my own CI, I never used Codeberg's because I was trying to be responsible with their resources because I liked [past tense] them. Getting back on GH actually means I don't have to do that anymore, I will enjoy leaching from Microsoft.
I do have my own self-hosted Gerrit I use for other somewhat more private things. But self-hosting has its own hassles (backups, security, etc).
And in fact one of those other things is in fact my own project to make a "forge" type thing. Vaguely similar to what Dorsey announced the other day (integrated git, chat, code review, code browsing, llm agent interaction, etc into one dynamic r) but I started on it quite some time ago, it's built on my own bespoke runtime, and it's generally more ambitious ... but also I'm not a techbro billionaire so I don't have the resources to finish it right now and I have to work on other projects.
https://scholar.social/@silvermoon82@wandering.shop/11696402... "I'm sorry you caught abuse off the slop fondlers. Consent and boundary issues are inbuilt in their community."
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 "You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look." "Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Both those threads have other examples, and there are plenty more other threads like them. It has the smell of a smug in group that allows no dissent.
I am also 80% certain there were comments on the PR (https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253) along similar lines that were removed but I have no backups or screenshots to backup that accusation.
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
I'm not surprised many here are upset. Many here don't seem to understand the outrageous harms that a totally out-of-control tech industry has been foisting upon the planet. It's time to take a stand for a better path forward.
all the harms come from for-profit companies that use crypto as a cover, like polymarket or stake. the contracts are on chain and might be open licensed but one company controls everything in practice with admin rights. and they make it hard to access directly without going through the proprietary frontend hosted on their servers.
the only ones who would ever want to host their code on codeberg are real community projects, because the corpos are all happy with github.
The second link and quotes sound bad, but placed in context they actually sound more reasonable arguments to me.
The "limits of consent" was somewhat misplaced, but in reply to someone arguing in bad faith about bad-faith interpretation of the rules. So it's not comparing LLMs use with rape, but comparing testing the limits/interpretations of rules with rape.
The violating of group values (which in my understanding has semantically nothing to do with rape/consent) was in reply to someone saying if you violate the rules a little, "noone will say anything" (so it was on point).
The nazi analogy was not an analogy at all. Noone implied LLM users are nazis. It's about how to interpret what is slop: the general rule of thumb that the only people worried that "anti-nazi" rules in communities are a slippery slope are the nazis themselves. The author was suggesting the same rule of thumb would apply to slop: those worried about the rule's interpretations are the ones making the slop. (a point i don't entirely agree with but more reasonable than the quote out of context)
All in all, i must say i cringed a little reading some discussions on this topic. And maybe i've missed the worst you witnessed due to deleted posts. But maybe you were also having a strong emotional reaction and the comments taken from afar are not as dramatic as you suggested?
Look you can be "anti-AI" all you want. I think this is a crude way to exist in the world -- positioning oneself morally on category rather than contingency -- but fine. But I expect basic decorum in a community. And what I got from those posts was: we decided people who used these tools are not part of our community -- are bad people who have "crossed a line" -- and anything goes in terms of how we respond to them. Despite that not being at all part of the terms of how Codeberg was initially defined or defined when I joined the organization.
Putting a sham "democratic" discussion around it doesn't save it. When I was involved more heavily in activist politics I would have been disgusted if an organization I was working with behaved like this; it's in-group implicit consensus masquerading as formal process.
Anyways, good riddance, I'm glad to be departing from such people, but no thanks for wasting my time.
Yes, and i'm not claiming you're wrong in your feeling that some people were excessive about this. Though i could argue that LLM deployment has been excessive too and this is a very minor comeback compared to the pressure people have faced to adopt LLM tools (eg. at work) or let new AI datacenters ruin their neighborhoods and electricity/water networks.
> it's in-group implicit consensus masquerading as formal process
That's indeed a problem in some circles. However, i fail to see what's the alternative. Letting a debate open for years before opening a formal vote sounds reasonable. That's far from the entryist tactics of building consensus behind closed doors in a secret affinity group then faking organicity and taking everyone by surprise with an "urgent" formal decision. I'm interested if you have feedback on how to organize more "democratically".
> I'm glad to be departing from such people, but no thanks for wasting my time.
I'm glad you feel relieved, and i'm sorry you lost time and energy in a collective where you don't fit in the end.
Grade school social behaviour.
Try to be a better person.
I grew up in a fundamentalist evangelical Christian community. I learned from a very young age what genuine empathy might look look vs the kind of "sympathy" whose goal is to buttress and support the pre-existing biases that the Church purveyed, and also all about in and out groups, and the application of abstract moralism over genuine personal relationships.
I don't think it's honest communication if the fundamental bias of one party is that the other party is "doing something wrong" and can never countenance any compromise, and defines that "wrong behaviour" as the foundation of exclusion from a community.
And that's what we have here with the section of the Codeberg community that took over there. Which you can see in the forum posts I referenced above. And they're now retroactively defining mores and values to make it seem like people like myself were always in the out-group.
We were not.
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.
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
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.
If you don't see the politics behind economic actors, i would recommend taking a closer look.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
It’s not a fallacy if it actually happened.
But this (and especially the AI ban) is a big red flag and I'm steering clear from Codeberg.
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.
> “ 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
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
Are you sure you don't feel insulted and threatened because you're yourself a sloperator, so it feels personal to have others criticize your practices from a moral standpoint? (i don't know, i haven't researched your profile)
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
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/
On the one hand its there site so they can do what they want and tbh its pretty easy to self host your own git server nowdays (which i do) however the issue i do have with this and really its a wider issue i have with the industry as whole:
I feel like we focus way to much ideology's and moral grandstanding which we then insert that into tech projects so seeing stuff like this makes we want to avoid using this site with a 10 foot pole. Can we just focus on tech not some moral grandstanding about politics, crypto blah blah but i guess thats too hard of a thing to ask or something
Please dont. I posted this here to spark a discussion on HN, not as a license to raid Codeberg. They're at liberty to set their own policies in the same way I'm at liberty to not use their services.
If you want to discuss this and you're not already an account holder at Codeberg, the comments section is right here.
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
1. that LLMs actually improve project quality, which may be true for projects with very clear style guides and test suites (eg. the linux kernel) but may also be false for 99% of projects (are the LLM tests testing good behavior or just random stuff?)
2. that codeberg's orientation is to host code for private businesses (it's a non-profit in which businesses may take part, but that's definitely not the target audience)
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.
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
Then again, Codeberg as a project can do whatever they want. I'm just happy that anyone can host Gitea, Gogs, GitBucket or GitLab or whatever they wnat. For my personal stuff Gitea works really nice with Woodpecker CI.
I'm sure many other hosted platforms don't have such stringent rules, though.
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.
Because the ToS helpfully doesn’t explain.
Does LLM autocomplete break the ToS? What about pre-LLM autocomplete? What about code written by LLM but reviewed by humans?
Also, the spirit of the community is clear, given the preamble and the provided moral basis for the decision: they don’t want any LLM usage at all.
I clearly remember why my account with lots of photos was deleted from mastodon.social without warning: There was a poll "Have you donated to the Antifa", two options: no / I'm a fascist. I replied there is some more nuance to the topic, also in some jurisdictions the organization is listed as a terrorist organization, and as such it is illegal to do so, link to an example (us in those days, it was in the news). Well, apart from some nice photos nothing of value was lost, also it was a great lesson why you need to self-host and not rely on "self-moderating communities" or megacorps...
Some taboo of that "community"... much like free healthcare or unionization or illegal migration is slave labour (and class warfare against the working class, including legal migrants and legal guest-workforce) in disguise (was banned from a VC funded SV echo-chamber for this opinion) are taboos of this "community".
Guess I'm an extremist... or just Eastern-European.
Do you know of any fediverse that won't instaban me if I accidentally post some wrongthink?
Since then I've been mostly participating on veqq's lobster interview threads. My highest posting volume was in my own interview thread. The interview itself took place before all of these unfortunate events. Veqq is a really nice person, one of a select few who told me they were sad to see me go, even though we have different viewpoints on AI.
> how is soft quitting war?
Culture war, I suppose.
Lobsters will probably be fine.
A friend of mine wanted to host a lemmy instance, but as soon as he opened registration it got flooded with pornography, even worse: mostly illegal. He deleted the instance immediately. This also gives me some sympathy for the moderation work that needs to be put in, which in turn makes disgruntled, or not fully aligned mods overreach, yet I don't want to be on the bad side of a tired mod.
Also I realized that I'm only mildly interested in the topics people usually discuss on these media. I contemplated self-hosting before, but realized it is not worth the hassle, I have a blog I don't have time to tend, or the important happenings in my life do not belong to the public.
I don’t want nor am I interested in arguing whether “handcrafted” is good or bad, just positing that some people would prefer it. May not be great for [i]growth[/i], but it’s not like Codeberg is a service by a megacorp aiming to corner the market (one of the reasons why everything is regressing to mediocre slop these days, but I digress).
That Torvalds plays for the other team is irrelevant. But if we’re mentioning him, one should recall that it was ol’ swears-a-lot himself who said “fork it or just walk away” on a similar topic.
subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
Since you studied the entire policy, what is the methodology in determining a project that uses generative AI-tools or not that covers the ban? What does "mostly" mean here? Is there a percentage defined? Or did they look at sourcehut's Anti-AI policy and start from there?
This is actually a good example since people can just fork existing "human made" software, (Free software permits you to do that) and run agents on it and hide the "slop" commits to circumvent that policy. Maybe someone would like in Rust and use an agent to do that. Or continue it as is but just adding new features quickly.
> subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.
...for now and it will eventually have more gen AI code anyway.
subsurface already has generative AI tools committing to the code base and the presence of the CLAUDE.md guarantees that. The same can be said with Vim which has an AGENTS.md allowing AI contributions.
Overall: there are humans performing the moderations. I trust them to have good judgement. This is not a witch hunt proposing to delete every repository where Claude has ever committed.
Personal interpretation: i think, from a very outside perspective (but that's what i'd do if i were in their place), that they'll inspect projects sorted by CI minutes consumed, then individually seeing if that's useful CI for useful projects (eg. fuzzing for tor or whatever) or if that's just slop CI for slop projects running countless steps on 100 commits an hour for software that's used by exactly 1 person (or even 0, who knows). From there, i'd start by failing the CI (and pushes) with a message inviting the user to read their mailbox, and send an email saying the user has been detected as malicious and should move away from codeberg, that existing code will remain available for a year, but no push/CI/issues will be permitted.
This will not remove 100% LLM-assisted project (which then again, was not the case), but might reduce codeberg resource usage by 10-99% depending on how bad the situation already is.
> run agents on it and hide the "slop"
I'm not sure how an agent would be able to hide that it's committing 100 commits an hour with 10k lines each, adding and removing tests as a mere inconvenience. But sure, let's assume so. That's just going against the rules, so the user may get banned.
> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?
It looks like we need more alternatives...
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.
Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter. It just doesn't matter.
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”
EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.
But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.
To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..
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.
The entire point of Forgejo, the git forge that Codeberg runs on as well, is that you can run your own very easily. I've stopped having private repos on Github completely in favor of my own Forgejo instance, and it's way smoother and nicer. Codeberg was never meant for private repos, but if I get around to starting a new floss project that I want to put out there, Codeberg would be a great option!
And sure, right now there is no cross-forge collaboration, so you need to have multiple accounts. But forge federation is planned, eventually you should be able to contribute to your friend's project from your instance. If you don't wanna wait, go look at https://tangled.org/ or something.
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.
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.
Making the proposal fit all the nuances would no doubt be a nightmare in an association structure with so many members distributed around the world, we've had 6h+ long meetings for deciding on wording of a controversial policy in our e.V., and that was with everyone involved in the same room.
Codeberg may simply not be the right forge for many projects, which is probably fine, but does leave a gap for a good non-big-tech forge alternative (tangled isn't a good alternative, fwiw).
> 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.
They are not trying to run an inclusive service.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
Codeberg seems to disagree about that point.
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.
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.
If you're not interested in stuff like that when your company is doing it, but are up in arms about some other platform deciding that they don't like crypto, I think you should look in the mirror. Their reasoning is probably the same: they don't like it and don't want to put up with the task of sensibly policing the category.
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
(KF got banned from Cloudflare, then had a lot of trouble finding an ISP, eventually made their own, and then had trouble finding upstreams. You might wonder what they did that was so bad but not illegal - that's a long story.)
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
I suppose since Codeberg is a totally free non-profit for OSS projects, it makes it more reasonable for them to ban code for idealogical differences (as opposed to legal).
But if it were a paid service, this would not inspire confidence that it's a place to host my company's code.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
Codeberg and others setting their own rules (especially if it's done via a community vote and not a decision by some random exec who's just heard a buzzword and now forces everyone to immediately adopt it) is actually a desirable outcome -- given that Forgejo or any other GitLab is open source, so you can (and somebody probably will) create more "hubs". This avoids lock-in by a single "hub" and hopefully will lead to more standartisation and cooperation instead of what we have now with a single largest hub like GitHub.
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.
This incident coupled with the Forgejo one (In which they twisted the whole story and made Gitea look like the biggest villain in FOSS when in fact they orchestrated the whole drama by submitting a controversial PR that many people don't know about) made me quit and keep away from their hosting.
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
Assuming that people that use blockchains are not principled is similar to assuming that people that use arrays are not principled.
Maybe more ridiculous, as you're supporting banks, card companies, and money transfer providers taking 1-6% of everyone's transactions.
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
They do not believe this because this is simply not the reality we live in
> Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
They are correct in this view. No matter how "apolitical" platforms like Github and various maintainers of open source projects pretend to be, the reality is that creating, hosting and distributing code is highly political and should be treated as such.
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
They are voluntarily choosing to be a publisher. Publishers are responsible for the actions that the users do on their platform.
States are happier with and want more publishers as it's easier to censor, add surveillance and control them than neutral platforms.
The few past times when Cloudfare censored politically was interesting as they quickly made apologies because they want to be seen more as a neutral platform than a service that nation states can control.
It's why modern internet legislation across all parties and across all nations is geared towards changing platforms into publishers.
And it's why the services that we would have seen to be independent and neutral in the past are choosing this new paradigm.
The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.
The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
Reddit bans abuse (defined as not uploading an ID photo), is that fine?
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.
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!
The larger body of users who don't want to be bothered are likely welcome, but there are rules to be followed.
They can go elsewhere you know? I mean, it's not like they are paying for anything.
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
I'll be more sympathetic to your view if similar rules are imposed by GitHub, given its network effect and many software ecosystems' dependency on GitHub on an infrastructural level. But codeberg is not that.
> 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.
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 guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
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.
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.
But I tried clicking on the link cited in the OP that would explain this ( https://forum.codeberg.org/d/82-taking-a-stance-against-cryp... ) and it got 404.
And getting a 404 on a host that's supposed to host code, now that is completely unacceptable and makes you want to stay far away indeed.
404, oh no! Better never use github!
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
Except that here is no censorship to be seen.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
I 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
Anecdotally I’ve come across a number of smaller crates in the Rust ecosystem that store their code there. Usually European devs.
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?
Moreover, the EU is a large market. If they e.g. switch to electric cars, it's not just them switching to electric cars, it's all the carmakers who want to continue selling into that market, who in turn design electric rather than ICE cars that they sell everywhere and increase the economies of scale for battery production which makes them more economical everywhere.
Codeberg has 0 paying customers. It is a non-profit providing services for free and not a business.
Membership in the non-profit requires fee paid by EU bank transfer and gives voting rights on questions like this but is separate accounting from use of the free sevices.
All this is explained front-and center or codeberg.org.
There's nothing surprising, new, or shocking about codeberg banning cryptocurrency projects. This is the logical conclusion of them being a non-profit acting for the good of humanity and not for the crypto grifters.
Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').
* - the code. Just the code. only the code. Nothing but the code. You don't need the issues, the roadmap, the ACL of which human can do what, the API access keys for third parties, the artifact repos. Just. The. Code.
Somewhat arsey in my tone? Yeah. But having done two large scale (100+ repos) forge migrations of our company's client projects (SVN -> github, then later on github -> bitbucket) and seeing people completely ignore the metadata surrounding the code that isn't as easy to "just push" anywhere, somewhat justified.
I 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?
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.
(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)
imo the best way to fix is with a hybrid model where consumers pay member fees to get discounts but decision making is down to workers, basically how it was before shareholder supremacy.
An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.
Their argument was economic, an economic solution would be good:
"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.
To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects"
Ultimately, democracy is a respectable form of government and the group is free to change their mind later.
here lies the fundamental misunderstanding by many people in this thread.
Is the objective of Codeberg to host as many projects as possible on its own server? I do not believe so!
The question then becomes "what is Codeberg's objectives?"
It's not to become the world's largest code forge instance! It's to build a set of FOSS tools for FOSS software development. Look at [0], for example, which lists alternatives.
But perhaps most importantly, the FOSS tooling can be self hosted, right? There's still a notion of freedom there.
[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
I have bunch of projects and sites there for a year+, most of them are llm generated.
What is a grace period for existing projects to move? What are criteria for deciding what is "vibe coded"? If i get banned, is the repo just deleted, or made readonly...
Codeberg had outage for last 5 days, where some repos could not be commited into. I expected post mortem analysis, not this debate!
Immediate. They can be deleted tomorrow.
> What are criteria
Common sense
> Is the repo just deleted
Probably. What would be the point of archiving (what they perceive as) garbage?
No such distinction exists. It was a just-so story made up by people trying to push the idea that moderation created a legal liability.
And it's German, anyway. The DMCA doesn't even apply there.
It was ever thus except when we remember.
Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.
Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.
As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.
- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).
- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.
- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."
- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).
The point of PoW is that it resists monopolization unlike PoS.
Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.
Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.
Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".
Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.
Very similar things can be said about VPNs. Seeing only the bad to justify banning an entire category is terrible.
Judging by your comment, looks like it's actually led by paying users, or whatever it is that these "members of the e.V." are.
A member is someone that signs up and pays a membership fee (currently that's at least 24€/year, see https://join.codeberg.org/). So yes, the people that pay get to vote. But we're also the ones sending money in to pay for the servers (which is the main source of income for Codeberg), since the e.V. is considered charitable I'm pretty sure this is legally a donation but im not gonna pretend to know things about our tax system.
I get that this sounds strange to people outside of Germany but it's a very common thing here, your local football club is an e.V. for example. It's also not that rare within the foss/software/nerd space, KDE and the CCC are both Vereine as well.
On the security spectrum I'm quite schizoid, but I'd say that's too much security.
Note, curiously enough, the companies I've seen have this level of paranoid defensive security, is Microsoft. Try to send an ICMP ping to servers of different companies, you'll notice that Microsoft servers don't respond to pings. Just thought it's funny that one of the most closed source companies coincides with a source code repo on secops philosophy.
Wow so they banned literally everything?
Whether something is someone's side project or not is independent of the amount of users or the presence of a community. They can now ban any project with a single maintainer that exceeds an arbitrary resource limit.
Basically they're putting a gun to your head demanding you to always be popular enough to curry their favour.
When you think about how most projects start unpopular by definition, the only way to host on Codeberg is first by becoming popular on another platform and then moving to Codeberg, but if that is true why bother migrating? The moment your project's popularity fades or you lose maintainers, the project will get axed by Codeberg.
So basically the lesson you're getting here is to not trust the altruistic stranger. His motivations are less sincere than the ones of the self interested stranger.
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.
Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.
Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.
With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.
Which is a waste of energy.
The thing that really screws them is that the government calls the nominal but not real asset price increase a capital gain and wants to collect tax on it.
In Vitalik's words: "If someone puts a gun to my head and tells me to write a hard-fork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download and install the update and switch to that chain? I see relatively few raised hands. This is called decentralization"
The least they could do as a nonprofit is make users aware that a core tenet of the service is to promote/ban whatever content the community voting decides any given day, and hopefully what ideology they are following.
Otherwise any serious person would to well to stay away from Codeberg; you don't know if your project will be in the community's sights in the next vote.
Unless your project is very sketchy to begin with, you have nothing to fear. I would understand this kind of fear if we talked about a company whose CEO dictates directions every month or so. But this is a non-profit with sane individuals and debates.
Imagine for a second if that were actually the case. Most rules are determined by physics, science, data, or something tangible. Food safety, aviation, electrical codes, even sports rules are based on math and statistics.
It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.
Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them
What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].
Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... [2]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/compare/17bdb39b0c1ecd0e42...
Absolutely. And it would be even better if the moderators each wrote a short summary that’s an honest attempt to describe what their individual ideologies are.
I respect institutions that clearly state their biases much more than those that pretend they have none.
We should also make sure people read all the blurbs before they join a website. Maybe we should call it the Terms of Service? ;)
Despite most websites having nothing but legalese in there, Codeberg's is pretty short and human readable by comparison. I know most people have been desensitized to it, but I haven't heard of any better way of coveying them at an institutional level.
So far it is now (unofficially) The hoster of Human-made™ non-crypto™ Free Software so far it is fully legal under the jurisdiction or country it resides in (Germany).
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros—Debian’s governance is slow but functional—but it seems to need guardrails around the process. (From what I can tell, an excruciating process is the best guardrail. Glacially slow decision-making means that mobs burn themselves out before they get to voting.)
Hyper-productive people are often volatile. Putting up with it is a necessary tradeoff, as the systems they produce often fill a niche that nobody else will serve adequately.
Stability? A BDFL can make decisions at a whim that radically destabilize and change the project. Lording over and causing immense harm to the community without any sort of accountability is a recipe for disaster.
Good for everyone? A BDFL can unilaterally make decisions that prioritize their own desires over everyone else. It becomes about their personality rather than the project.
Functional? A BDFL is less functional, seeing how there is no requirement that the BDFL do anything that the community of people actually wants.
If you're saying you're opposed to democracy because you don't like the decision that codeberg reached democratically, the BDFL can do the exact same thing. Except the process is far worse, because there is literally no input from anyone else on making the decision.
Small community “democracy” OTOH often devolves into ochlocracy, or reactive mob rule. Small communities are easily swayed, don’t often have a durable vision, and can easily be infiltrated by people who don’t have the best interest of the project (or the users) at heart.
The only thing that can offset these effects is a heavy process, like Debian has, which slows down the mob and forces everyone to consider all sides of the issue. This can actually work! And for some projects it’s a better fit than a BDFL.
Well I suppose that's also technically true of governments...
Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.
Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.
They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.
This isn't very cool of you.
Then you would have been a supporting member, and had the opportunity to vote on this decision.
And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.
It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.
Taking a stance does not mean you adopted an "us vs. them" mentality.
What a bonkers generalization.
Drew I think is just kind of a dick who has a history of putting his personal crusades before delivering a product people want. I remember a few years back sourcehut being reported as unstable and he went and lashed out at people who were complaining to him about it instead of fixing the issues. And he banned crypto projects cause he doesn't like them, at least Codeberg held it to a vote.
Patrick Volkerding is a pretty stable guy, I think he's the model more BDFLs should strive to be.
I think Drew suffers a little from lack of focus. I greatly appreciate his work on Harelang, sway, and aerc for instance, but these are quite far from his Sourcehut work. (I can see how aerc and Sourcehut dovetail with the plaintext email focus, at least.)
When I join a community, I would like to be able to predict whether tomorrow, they might ban Chinese projects, or projects written in Lisp, or projects that only run on Windows.
This doesn’t follow from the ToS, it follows from what the platform’s values are. Codeberg does publicly state its claimed values, but they don’t imply these new bans.
You can find it on lobsters though, where I did post the full reply along with the prompt in response to the exact same cop out. To this day, it's still the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire 300+ comment thread I posted it in. Not bad for a clanker, huh?
To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value
If Codeberg wants to put a flag up to draw in every programmer with a personality disorder, well that may be their right, but it’s not a good idea.
Welcome to society. There is no such thing as a meritocracy.
Yes, the effect is it will become a toxic community where your project can be summarily judged and instantly dismissed as slop because there's an AGENTS.md file in the repository or LLM attribution in the commit messages.
Right or wrong many users are utterly uninterested in said content and wish that their existing communities could continue as they did prior to the onslaught. Naturally, some communities will decide to attempt to moderate in such a way that supports those users desires. As with most necessary moderation of online communities there will be gray areas and judgement calls and drama and abuse. There really isn’t an alternative.
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
The ToS change grammar could do with tightening up as well.
> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Does this change your view of HN? Of Codeberg? Of vibe enforced rules?
Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.
Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.
But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.
And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.
There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.
There's no way for anyone reading their rules to know if their projects are slop. It's full of "mostly" and "significantly". That's virtually guaranteed to boil down to "we don't like it".
So "they didn't know how to define it" is about the most charitable interpretation I can muster. Alternative interpretations, such as "the vagueness is a feature since it enables selective enforcement", are also available, and they only get more and more uncharitable.
> Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable.
Had they wanted to define it, they would have done so.
> Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I have insight into their actions, and I'm perfectly capable of inferring context and motives from them.
> I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, it is desirable that things be precisely defined so that people can know where they stand. Depending on the exact definition, I may or may not be welcome. Therefore I'm not going back there without a precise definition.
And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.
Are you saying you are opposed to this on the grounds that anything could happen in the future? That doesn't really make sense. Yes, anything could happen. Yes, people change. That is true in nearly all contexts.
If you're asking in good faith, you participate in the community democratically and try to influence others. Just like normal.
There was a vote held for this decision, it was 306-154.
One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.
We have different places with different philosophies. It is okay to be different, otherwise everything would look boringly identical.
Sincerely, A meat lover and a codeberg fan.
I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.
The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.
An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.
Working 40 hours a week is a political number.
Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.
The trouble with this reasoning is that it's always an isolated demand for rigor.
This other of the major grocery store chains, does it sell food produced by factory farms or huge unsavory agribusiness corps? Are any of its major shareholders the Wall St jerks who do all the sort of thing Wall St jerks do, or anyone else who isn't a good person? It probably sells to anyone who walks in the door without checking who they are, so they could be far-<disfavored side> extremists. Can you support a company whose customers are such people?
The world is extremely interconnected. As soon as you open up looking not at what some company or person is doing themselves but at what anyone who works for them or supplies them or buys from them is doing, there will be someone you don't like. And then whether you're refusing to do business with them depends not on whether that is the case, since it is always the case, but instead on who is whispering in your ear to tell you who to hate.
The other major chain is a consumer’s cooperative, which is owned by the members and has no stock dividend or major stock ownership. Instead ”dividends” are paid on basis of how much you money spent at the stores (somewhere around 0.5% is repaid as redeemable cheques I think). Each region of stores has yearly meetings where members are allowed to voice opinions and discuss proposals on things like that. It’s certainly not perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not better.
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
I think your implication is that Codeberg have recently demonstrated they’re the kind of people who banned multiple significant categories (there’s probably a better word?) of software this week, so they probably will continue and ban a a number of additional software categories in the coming year(s)?
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.
HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.
Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?
HN is a social network. Its value is human comments. People come here to see what the tech circles are saying.
A git host's value is in the source code it hosts, not who wrote it. Before all this, Codeberg was all about free software. This has a very precise definition. Free software communities used to gatekeep based on a very simple test: is it free software or proprietary software? The problem is people have started gatekeeping cryptocurrency, LLM usage. The definitions are imprecise, there's no telling where it's going to stop, and it causes needless fragmentation.
But the GPs comment blamed Mastodon as a whole for allowing the possibility of admin abuse, which isn't substantially different from HN.
Why did you include the qualifier "under capitalism"? Is it ethical to be supporting Mao or Stalin rather than Rockefeller?
> The other major chain is a consumer’s cooperative, which is owned by the members and has no stock dividend or major stock ownership.
That's great, now how does it get you out of the problem? Not only do you have all the other members profiting from your consumption and by the numbers some of them will be undesirable, the coop itself is still part of the system. When they take out a loan to buy the building or pay rent to a landlord, the money goes to the bank/landlord. The coop has to pay the market price for the space in the city with the crooked zoning board, driving up profits for the real estate speculators paying them off. When the coop sells you a box of Cheerios, the profits still go to Nestlé, which has been involved in scandals on everything from baby formula to environmental pollution to labor practices. The other major companies have had their own scandals and the minor brands are often the same product in a different box.
And you're missing the most fundamental part of the problem: You don't actually know these people. That shareholder of the other grocery chain, were they convicted of insider trading because they did it, or because the prosecutor filed a charge they couldn't prove and then had to save face by offering a deal to pay a fine less than the legal expenses would be to vindicate themselves in court? The anti-LGBTQ movements, was it a billion dollars to a warlord murdering gay people, or a thousand dollars to a PAC that thinks there might be a reason women's sports exists separately from men's? These things are at least a difference in degree, and that's what matters when you're choosing between alternatives that are all less than perfectly pristine. Moreover, you would need to know not just all of these specific details about them, but all of these specific details about everyone else, before you could determine who is actually better on balance. Is that guy better or worse than Nestlé? When you go to the coop, do you know for every product which company makes it, and who they do business with? Nobody can hold all of that in their head and much of it isn't even public information.
And then we're back to the actual problem. Who is telling you who to hate? When nobody is perfect, anybody can be made into the villain just by selectively highlighting or exaggerating their flaws and ignoring the ones in the alternative.
And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.
But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.
This is more like asking someone colorblind which shade of red the image is closer to.
There are also systems that exist between “legally mandated voting” and “whoever shows up”.
You could even set different thresholds based on the importance of the issue! (Decisions like ToS changes would seem to be quite important.)