I Regret Migrating to Codeberg

I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal had a short presentation and a few minutes of Q&A.

It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue.

It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"

Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix

The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.

I don't share that concern.

It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources. Personally, I have a group of friends who share a GitLab instance, for example. Are you allowed to use it? No. Why? Because I didn't go to middle school with you decades ago. Is that fair? I don't really find that question relevant. I also keep a Gitea instance running at home for all the junk that really doesn't belong on someone else's hardware. Using someone else's forge isn't the only option.

> A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries

But, wait, Codeberg always had limitations on what projects are hosted there??? This been very explicit from the start, it's for FOSS and anything outside of that isn't welcome. It's one of the reasons I donate there in the first place. Now they're adding additional requirements, which most of the voting memebers voted for, this doesn't seem strange to me.

> Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.

Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.

Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read, and seems it auto-closes no matter where you click. Seems a bit distracting if nothing else :)

If you click to another tab, the site changes its title and favicon to a random webpage like:

- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT

- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube

- Amazon.com: waifu pillow

When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js

> LLM-generated code, or is cryptocurrency-related

Codeberg is making decisions to better manage their resource and infrastructure. It's no different than any other privately owned platform, making decisions to forbid certain kinds of content, or ban people for various reasons. Unlike other large centralized platforms, they at least tried to involve the community in this decision-making process, but in the end it's their call.

If you don't want to be under the mercy of someone else's decisions, you have to become more independent and host it yourself. Even then, who owns your server? Who owns the "pipes" of the network? They have terms of services, and can also ban you for various reasons, including your nationality, beliefs, etc. This line of thinking leads to a bigger question of how/whether a truly decentralized and free (as in freedom) computing and communication network is possible, how such a network can defend against abuse and malicious actors without compromising that freedom.

I’d been thinking maybe I should move some projects from GitHub to Codeberg… but this change has a chilling effect since now whoever is making the LLM-generated decision might arbitrarily decide to ban a project based on undefined criteria, like say an em dash in a README — so projects hosted there are not in any way safe from just disappearing.

To be honest though, I don’t know what happens when something gets banned from Codeberg, or anything about the appeals process, so my brain leap to the project just disappears forever; afaik the posts I read about this policy change didn’t say. Would welcome anyone familiar with their policies to chime in and enlighten me.

The most insightful part is:

> [From CodeBerg] It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.

> This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows

Yes! And LLMs can be valuable to solo devs!

> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did...

I agree this is troubling.

There's a lot of LLM dislike that verges into a potentially problematic ideology. I know: how a tool is used, not the tool itself, etc, but I'm unsure that that kind of approach is visible to CodeBerg. I write open source, and closed source, and I am a responsible developer who uses AI and gets more done, better. I wish I was welcome there.

Article summary: Censorship is when you choose not to host some things on your platform. The author, although not caring about LLMs or cryptocurrency, can't bear to use a platform where some things are not allowed.

> Despite not owning a single project that falls into either banned category, I’m now going to look into setting up my own public Git host

That's.. good, actually. I believe that even if Codeberg was good and perfect for every use case of code hosting, not every one and every project should be there. Vibe-coders, shitcoin cryptomaxis, and lovers of total freedom surely have other places to go and are able to set up forges using the same software that Codeberg uses as well. It's the magic of open source.

Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet. GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, sure, they might have been better back in the day, but being _the_ places for a type of content online they were able to privatize a lot of very valuable data, sell it off for AI training, while slowly strangling to death any interoperability and "public access" that once made the services feel like a free-for-all market square of the internet. Long live the small web!

Codeberg is not in any way obligated to make sweeping infrastructure changes just to make sure that they can keep hosting projects they find to be against their mission.

I wonder how anyone can migrate to codeberg. Every time I check, the site is lagging. Few days ago I registered and tried to create a repository. I couldn't, site busy or something.

The migration towards codeberg already started a while ago, don't see how it can scale.

Hmmm. They migrated from github because it was becoming shitty, now their complaint with codeberg is more that will ban on the basis of content. On the next gitwhatever they will find for sure other issues.

I know it's hard but any non-casual developer must self-host their version control (and assorted project data), and treat cloud VCs sites just as mirrors.

Codeberg is run by a German association, which defines its role in the bylaws to support FOSS (§2 in the bylaws). You can use their software Forgejo to run your own server.

A nitpick:

> the only cOmMuNiTy [most free software projects] have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time not contributing in any form whatsoever

Reporting bugs is contributing. Especially when you emphasize "any form whatsoever".

That said, I broadly agree with the author. But I wonder if this attempt to discourage egregious AI slop will some day make Codeberg a more trustworthy or pleasant place than alternatives. Maybe it's not the right choice for OP (or me, for some projects), but it seems like a good thing for a sizeable forge to exist that has some strictness or selectiveness to it. Maybe the world doesn't need another one-size-fits-all platform like GitHub.

Codeberg might ironically become a boon to AI companies with this policy, as well, by effectively doing a bunch of curation work for them, if not by providing outright untainted training data.

For a more informed discussion about what's banned and what's not, I'm leaving here this discussion on Mastodon: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116962454004862117

TL;DR: AI assisted coding, when used responsibly, is not banned, however one-shotting something via vibe-coding and hosting it as a complete project, is.

Also, Codeberg always had a limit on private repositories and never wanted to be a place for non-FLOSS software. It's their mission. They are not out there to replace GitHub/GitLab.

Another very american understanding of censorship. In Germany (where Codeberg is registered), censorship means censorship by a government. A private entity (Verein) deciding what and how they want to run their business is typically not considered censorship (maybe the term "private censorship" could work), but just "freedom of doing business". So if you want to argue FOR freedom, you could also turn this argument around and support the fact that a private entity should be able to decide whatever the fuck they want to do with their own service offering.

I'm guessing the

>sh.tcoin

in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though

This prompted me to revisit my own decision to avoid Codeberg by re-reading their Terms of Use[1]. A few things stand out:

   - They explicitly require all hosted software to have a FLOSS license

   - Private repos are only allowed in support of Public FLOSS repos, with a scary ambiguous note about "really small and personal stuff"

   - Projects with heavy use of coding AI are explicitly forbidden

This means I can't use Codeberg for personal projects that aren't intended for public consumption, especially if I used Claude Code to whip them up. Oh well, this is why I self-host Forgejo.

For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:

> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.

> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.

> 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).

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

>and the only cOmMuNiTy they have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs

Not even this. Most open source software is solely used by the creator and usually soon after abandoned. The idea of starting a new project and abandoning it after the honeymoon period is nowhere near a new phenomenon.

    > The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:

    > > Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

---

This naive "rapid pace"...

Those who do in that careless "pace" will invest more time maintaining it, fixing it, supporting it, or well... realizing it, I believe.

Not to mention that they make themselves more and more dependent on some LLM vendor prospering these vendors with each iteration and tokens burned, and training their models on your own ideas, creativity, and your time of life. Yet, not a single person will guarantee a stable outcome, and no one to blame after. Is that "development"? That is dark horrific sorrow.

This "vibe coding" may be quick at starters, if lucky and all Gods and the Fortune got you, yet supporting that and investing your life time after?

No, never. I have my own mind to train. The people I work with have their own minds. The Communities out there have their own minds. We all have our mind to develop, and learn from each other. Otherwise, it’s empty, pointless, and not art you will be proud of as a developer who inscribes moments in the history, and stand your name in it.

Most people I know are delighted by these changes and the only people I've seen complain are the ones that let their unmonitored LLM(s) rum rampent.

It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned; they just don't want to be flooded with unmaintained slop.

Whole story makes me think of Lyudmilla from Star City. You think these measure are about the common good but most people just don’t see the psychopaths in front of them taking control, step by step. You didn’t vote to stop AI slop. You voted to approve discrimination. The question on paper was “Can we ban AI slop” but the actual vote was “This site doesn’t discriminate. Some of us want power to fuck people over. Do you want to take a step in that direction?” It’s funny that they talk about communities because online communities are very often cesspools of psychopaths. I suppose it’s good that they showed us who they are.

Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.