I’ve seen so many variations of this where a community starts adding more rules that are open to judgment.

Removing the obvious rule breakers looks like an easy win at first. Then over time the list of rules grows. Small groups become good at navigating the rule making process and getting changes pushed through. Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors. The community was long since cleared out from anyone who got sick of the drama, leaving a weird internal battle where different in groups are fighting with each other over little things and turning the rules against each other.

Maybe Codeberg will be different. Maybe the rule making stops here and it’s reasonably enforced against only the really bad examples, with leeway granted to others generously. Maybe it doesn’t turn into a slippery slope of little dramas that exhaust everyone who isn’t invested in the constant background drama of their code hosting site. I hope it does for their sake.

But I also think enough people like me have seen what happens to communities that go down the path of generating a lot of rules like these and will choose to steer clear of this site. It always feels like a good idea when you and all your friends are on the right side of the rules, but it’s less fun when you find yourself making choices or tip toeing around to avoid triggering the Nth round of rules that were introduced 10 steps past where you thought the rules were in a good and balanced place.

Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

    I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

The goal is to reduce the amount of use of the platform, and I think imposing this rule is an excellent way to do that. Not sure I'd call it genius, though. There's a fair likelihood of unintended consequences.

I've been thinking along these lines more and more. Trying to specify exact limits and trying to account for every possible situation when making rules just encourages people to find holes and workarounds. It creates a game, a competition between the rule makers and everyone else.

When instead you state higher level values and ask for cooperation, it encourages us to work together. It's the Honor System instead of a deliberate competition between rule makers and everyone else.

Concrete example: sports

When you are playing with a group of friends and there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part because we all love the game and want to have a good time.

Once you introduce referees, the game within the game of "what can I get away with?" starts and you end up with players learning how to foul without getting caught and then players overreacting to fouls in order to make sure the rule breakers still get caught, and then it evolves into flopping to get a foul called even when there was none, and eventually people start to hate the sport altogether (see: NBA, FIFA)

Concrete example: government and police forces. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?

This is a lesson I learned in life: When you want to build something social (in this case a community, but it could also be a romantic relationship, a friendship...), the best thing you can do is to polarize as quickly as possible.

Too many people are afraid to offend and waste everyone's time going along with things they don't really agree with and end up pretending to be somebody they're not to get along with people they don't really like.

No! Get your most polarizing takes out quickly. Either you and the other person stop wasting time because there's no fit, or you will deepen the relationship and both know it's a good fit. Either way, it's better for everyone involved.

There's enough people out in this big world that you don't need to always make everyone happy. It's much better to quickly comb through to find the gems.

Yup, there's no issue with this.

Because literally no one will use Codeberg for anything that matters. It was already niche, now Codeberg will just be a couple of unemployed nerds with their useless toy projects.

It's already dead, Jim.

Exactly.

> The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.

It is way too arbitrary and open to interpretation and biases.

Devs are so spoiled. They first tried to sell themselves as morally better than GitHub, and now the spoiled devs ban who uses AI..

> I do not like to build on a foundation that could be ripped away from under my feet at any moment for arbitrary reasons.

Do you only build and publish software in a vacuum running on hardware you own? There is no online community in the western hemisphere that isn't subject to any kind of arbitrariness, be it internal (community, like here) or external (legal or infrastructurally, like on github).

A notable surprise with Bluesky over the past few months is that the anti-AI sentiment has decreased slightly as it becomes harder to argue against impactful use cases.

At the start bluesky was actually pretty nice, but now it's just this weird bubble where disagreements don't exist and when I checked out like a month ago there was just so much damn p***.

The way I read the article was not that the author disagrees with the concerns you mention, but instead that they believe Codeberg's recent actions fail to address these underlying concerns while adding uncertainty for users of their platform (which they fear will ultimately hurt codeberg). To me, it reads as a call for further discussion and clarification rather than a dismissal.