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#codeberg#projects#don#crypto#code#https#project#community#ban#host
Discussion (211 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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.
> 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.
> 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".
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.
> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them
What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].
Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... [2]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/compare/17bdb39b0c1ecd0e42...
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
So far it is now (unofficially) The hoster of Human-made™ non-crypto™ Free Software so far it is fully legal under the jurisdiction or country it resides in (Germany).
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
I agree that this is probably going to cause some fragmentation, but I'm not convinced that it will do so in a meaningful matter or at the scale at which it is problematic to the free and open source ecosystem.
For what it's worth, Forgejo is working on federation[1], which might address your networking effect concerns?
[1]: https://forgejo.org/2026-05-monthly-report/#federation
Codeberg isn't competing against Github for market share, it serves a specific demographic with a specific ideology. Anyone is welcome to use any other host they want for their crypto and AI projects, with whatever policies align with their preferences. Or make your own with blackjack and hookers.
There shouldn't even be "default choices" or "huge network effects" in FOSS anyway. That's just another form of centralization.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
Asking people to define that nearly got me kicked out of lobsters.
These people don't want to have to define it. Ironically, they're going to enforce their rules based on vibes. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced.
That's the neat part, you don't.
(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)
Sure ban Cryptocurrency projects whatever, its your platform. But calling a code hosting service "political" and acting like its the Galatic Senate is just wrong priorities. It is hard to take something serious like that if they just say "hey we are political whether you like it or not" without spending susbtantial amount of time ensuring its clean, transparent and good politics not a bunch of sith lords jerking each other off.
Everything is political, FOSS is political, GitHub is also political.
When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.
The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
You’re welcome to host it at your own venue. Or , I guess, to keep whining that you’re not being given free services by someone who dislikes your work.
>Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort
in the current year, that's a massive red flag.
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use
Mostly positive HN discussion when this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403780
Rightly or wrongly, Codeberg had a different feel. For a while it felt like it was trying to be a refuge from Github. But then again, maybe that was projecting something on them that they didn't intend.
Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros (Debian’s governance is slow but functional), but it seems to need guardrails around the process.
This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
So it's totally fine to poke fun, and totally fine for them to do whatever they want. We aren't part of that community!
They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
Are they though? I see "We are more than just Git hosting: Our community is ..." right in the highlight box on their landing page.
If they want to ban scammers then why don't they just ban scammers instead of a blanket policy that bans legitimate projects as well?
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
Sovereign personal infrastructure is amazing. Highly recommended. Dealing with the government's rules and their politics is obnoxious enough. I'm starting to really lose patience with all of these communities.
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/
Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.
https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html
and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
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
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
I have small open source projects that I won't move to Codeberg ever now because I don't want to waste any mental energy pondering if I might get banned in the future.
For example I have a stock trading backtracking strategy test tool. Will they ban anything related to fintech in the future because it is deemed evil? I don't want to have to think about that.
Will they ban my crappy game macroing tool to automate some simple repetitive game actions because it is considered cheating or against some game ToS? I don't care and I don't want to have to care about a possible ban. It's a glorified auto clicker to prevent RSI health issues ffs.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.
Once you open the door, it’s going to be really difficult to resist political pressure in other areas. The mob is easily swayed against new targets.
Well, sounds like it is a successful technology.
There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop
As it stands, AI has already surpassed the energy consumption of all cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin, and is also burning the entire planet [0]. It is only going up due to the data center build out. [1][2]
The cryptocurrency industry already found ways to migrate off of PoW to Proof-of-Stake so there exists an efficient alternative to reduce emissions.
AI still does not and the hard requirement is to build more data centers to keep up with the scale, hence higher token prices, energy prices, electronics and water.
[0] https://www.cell.com/joule/abstract/S2542-4351(25)00142-4
[1] https://ai2027-tracker.com/predictions/ai-power-consumption/
[2] https://www.aon.com/en/insights/articles/securing-power-glob...
A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.
More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260723015826/https://codeberg....
Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/
I’d be willing to bet there are more crypto people who never touched codeberg in this thread than genuine codeberg users.
For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.
This behavior all reads a lot like a guy going to a fundraiser for breast cancer and then getting upset that nobody is talking about type 2 diabetes. AI and Crypto engineers have a multiple huge platforms to collaborate - let people who wish to be separated from that environment of toxicity have their own too.
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
> “ Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”
Github still works, and the crypto ecosystem also has arweave and many others for static assets
HN loves to preach democracy until a platform governs itself in a way they disagree with.
It is like “I’m not taking anything from that food bank since they clarified that they won’t be accepting or doling out rat meat” like ok buddy, you do you
Honestly, I think this measure actually gives Codeberg a competitive edge in terms of code quality.
I think we're now seeing a pattern where, under a 'free' large market, regulations are being used to create unique market identities. That's my take—it depends on what you regulate, which determines the market's character.
Personally, I've noticed that when Codeberg announced regulations around AI code, most of the comments cheered. But when the same people talk about cryptocurrency regulations, they get angry. It seems like people just want to regulate what they don't like, not what they do.
I won't use Codeberg myself, but I think this policy is reasonable. I've decided that what you regulate defines your market's identity.
Also commercial activity tends to happen when everyone involved in the activity comes out ahead, so placing it as opposed to "net good" is perhaps a bit dubious.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
If you are after a sustainable and stable code repository to host your projects then Codeberg disqualified themselves. It goes down regularly as much as GitHub and loses to GitHub on discovery.
Now, you can potentially lose your entire account and projects by posting a repo that can have AI with auto-complete.
If Linus Torvalds (pro-AI) published his scuba-diving software [0] there, which there is a CLAUDE.md file in the repository, it would get banned.
[0] https://github.com/subsurface/subsurface
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.
edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?
> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground