I regret migrating to Codeberg
xn--gckvb8fzb.com392 points by boramalper a day ago
392 points by boramalper a day ago
Keeping up with this stuff is for people who define their identity through virtue signalling and whatever personality trait they have decided to make the problem of everyone around them.
Let them have their little corner of the internet and just stay away. There's plenty of alternatives run by people who don't feel the need to bring their personal baggage into a cooperative environment.
Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore large parts of Codeberg's explanations, regarding the amount of traffic they get from one-man LLM shows, and additionally completely fail to consider the type of organization, that Codeberg is, in order to label this as merely virtue signaling?
> Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore
Yes. Let me stop you right there: Yes, absolutely. Whatever they claim their reasons are, it's not my problem. I don't care.
The last Codeberg story that popped up here just this week was something about them banning Bitcoin. At that pace you should worry whether you're next.
Which is why my advice is: Avoid the headache. Go somewhere else.
I get your point but by your own reasoning here you can't ignore these things because you are also choosing to be principled in your own way here, right? Like you need to know, at the very least, what to avoid if you absolutely must steer clear of all the politics you hate right? Like if you don't even know and choose not to know, how will you have the early warning that the SaaS is gonna ban your hypothetical crypto repo?
You can't let your strong principles get in the way of being practical in this kind of world! It's kinda impossible to be as absolute as you want to be but also have your head-in-the-sand about it. You kinda gotta pick one of those..
At the very least, just not a good look from the outside IMO.
Imaging where the world would be if Firefox, when it came out, went deep on the Iraq war? Or if RMS got involved in, I don't know, the Lewinsky affair in the 1990s, and made it a core part of the FSF?
We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.
Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
When even RMS seems like a more level headed political actor, you know you've gone off the deep end.
Haha, "RMS has more level-headed politics than Codeberg taking a position against LLMs" is a fun take.
"nice things" you mean upholding the harm of the status quo by not criticizing it
But do people look at installing a formulae in brew and wonder "what's their position on Uyghur oppression in Western China?" Like, wow, jxl is pretty neat, but they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
Insanity. IMO. Keep that stuff at home.
The article calls another entity exerting its right of free association 'censorship'. This too is signaling a certain set of values.
Even Immoral and Amoral companies serve values that others might consider 'baggage'.
Palantir worshipping death and war has caused their civilian contracts to suffer and languish. This is baggage; It may be their own death knell.
'(amorally) maximizing shareholder value (for the next quarter)' is (for me) an insane value system on its face, and makes problems for everyone around them, yet who argue like you are here don't see that as 'personal baggage' at all.
What are these plentiful alternatives? SourceHut also comes with “personal baggage”.
Just host your own git server, it's an afternoon project. Use other forges as mirrors.
It really is a shame Drew is so opinionated and dogmatic.
I like most of his work, but his politics make Source Hut too shaky of a foundation to build on.
docker run data.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner:12 forgejo-runner
Well said. This is one of the most concise and from my point of view accurate accounts of what is happening right now.
I'm personally sick of all the politics in OSS development, as such, I no longer actively contribute.
Different strokes for different blokes/whatever floats your boat. I don't care, do as you please.
> In addition, Codeberg conflates “having a community” with “being legitimate software worth hosting”
I don't think this is a fair summary. I don't see this conflation in Codeberg's blog post. The words in quotation marks don't actually exist in Codeberg's blog post.
It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team. The concern is that some people don't gobble up an unfair amount of resources.
I personally have been moving to self-hosted Foregejo for ultimate freedom. But I also think it's fair for some providers have the freedom to take a bit more of a harsh (or based - depending on your perspective) stance against LLM generated code. I mean, a lot of people have been bemoaning the fact that the human-generated material has been increasingly hard to find in a sea of AI-generated material. It could be nice to have a corner of curated, human-made code still available on the web.
> It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
---
> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> 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.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
---
[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
[flagged]
>but whenever something expresses its right to do or not do
The problem (or the virtue?) of this comment is that it's impossible to decipher with which side it disagrees, and for what reason too. Cause both sides expressed their right to do or not to do.
> They aren't obligated to do any of that; they own the platform.
> Play ball or get out.
People can say things on their way out, and this is what's happening.
They don’t pay tax, right? Correct me if I’m wrong. It’s definitely a different (and public) conversation when things are claimed done for the public benefit and thus exempt from tax.
At least in the US tax-exempt status carries obligations.
[flagged]
In the ai-article op did say they’d do exactly that. Though it is surprising they left GitHub due to ““enshittification” of the platform under Microsoft’s ownership”, when it’s likely GitHub is using similar ai practices the op is and matches their exact ai usage.
Citing the op themselves: “ an alarming number of self-described AI experts whose expertise appeared to consist entirely of having a ChatGPT or Claude subscription and the willingness to write about it in seventeen-paragraph posts.”
If you can’t keep up with the load, say that. Limit new signups and/or implement rate limiting, and ideally scale up if you can.
DO NOT try to spin that into taking some form of moral high ground. DO NOT make yourself the arbiter of what is and is not considered a worthwhile project. That is not neutral. That is not free.
They're not obligated to deal with the higher load brought on by people's LLM coded projects, CI pipelines etc. In order to keep things freed up and flexible for others, I think it's fair for them to say, "in this community, we're going to save the space for more hand-coded projects."
It's not fair for everyone to have to eat the costs of AI (like communities getting bulldozed for data centers) and just accept that it has to be used.
Of course nobody is obligated and I never claimed that. In fact, I fucking hate the LLM hypetrain. But this decision is decidedly non-neutral and non-free.
Resources were never part of the original discussion. It was about values. This is the author of the ToU addition the day it landed: https://mastodon.social/@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social/1169...
He also has a lot of posts since: https://mastodon.social/@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social
Agree. Providers who don't want to deal with LLM generated code should be respected as part of the free market. Let the market decide which direction is for the better or at least allow for niches that cater to certain audiences.
That is fine unless you claim to be a neutral and free as in freedom service provider. You are clearly not at that point.
Define resources and create a better limit then. 10 small code-only projects will take orders of magnitude less storage, bandwidth and cpu than one project with committed image and sound assets.
The resource limit are quite clear: From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
> people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources
So block huge resource use? What if people use LLMs with disproportionately tiny resource use?
Making a principled ban against LLM would seem to allow for more freedom and flexibility with usage limits. People who are creating more by hand would still be allowed to have more breathing room. With a hard limit of resources everyone would be more restricted. That's also a solution, but it's just a totally different approach. The LLM ban could help to allow for freedom without the resources getting overwhelmed.
Only if you can reasonably separate LLM from non LLM code, which is in no way a solved problem. Even if one agrees with their priorities 100%, it's just asking for non-automated enforcement. It's difficult to execute, and either lead to completely arbitrary enforcement, or a lot of resources being spent in exchange for this freedom you mention. It's just a very hard practical line to try to draw.
And let's be real, most of the costs LLMs incur on hosting providers have little to so ln who makes commits. A popular project than bans LLMs from contributing, but is used often by LLMs that are using the project as a library is indistinguishable from one that allows LLM contributors.
So from a practical perspective, it's a head scratcher
It's true that an LLM ban is really hard to enforce, but that doesn't mean it's worthless. If i make an image editor and say "It is my policy that serial killers and pedophiles cannot use my software" i can't really enforce that, but it still makes a (somewhat useless) statement.
In my opinion, not allowing LLM code at least signals that codeberg (and forgejo) itself is unlikely to be majority LLM code, which raises its stock in my book; It signals what kind of people the maintainers are.
> principled ban against LLM
So was it about high resource use, or a principle?
> People who are creating more by hand would still be allowed to have more breathing room.
What about the breathing of people creating by hand with a sprinkle of an LLM?
> but it's just a totally different approach.
Indeed, a better one where you manage directly the issue you claim to care about
My interpretation is that the resource usage should be roughly proportional to the human activity involved. That wouldn’t restrict resource usage by any individual project, which might be a popular project with many contributors and a lot of activity, but the resource consumption needs to be justified by corresponding human effort and interest, which LLM usage doesn’t exhibit.
The main problem is that so many LLM users are selfish bastards and they won't respect the spirit of such rules and will only stop when the hard disk quotas force them to.
So now your solution entails lowering the quota for everybody because allowing in LLyou must assume eve
How does adding a few words to TOS stop "selfish bastards"?
Gives them a line to justify removing projects in the future if they are caught violating the ToS.
I think you are wrong. A better way is to have a free tier and charge for usage.
A more relevant quote is "to enable equal opportunities regarding the access to knowledge and education." from their mission statement. As a gemeinnütziger Verein (charitable association) their charta is legally binding.
All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others...
The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the spicy autocomplete.
well one can argue that many more people will write code with AI assistance than without it.. here i see the opposite: The wish of few outweigh the need of many.
Can one argue with a straight face that people will learn to code better by using a predominantly AI-based workflow? Or even learn by reading vibecode uploaded by someone else?
Hell, I'd argue that Vibecode without the prompt that generated it isn't even real open source.
Can you argue that you could learn to code better, copying and paste code from stack overflow? Who wants to learn, learns.. we did without Internet, and I still learn with AI.. btw, is in the "Satzung" from Codeberg e.V something about "learn to code?
> Can you argue that you could learn to code better, copying and paste code from stack overflow?
The learning doesn't come from copying and pasting code from stack overflow. It comes from
A) searching which code to copy and paste
and
B) Fixing the broken code that you just copied and pasted.
I suspect most programmers outgrow the "copying and pasting from stackoverflow" period of their development pretty quickly when they get frustrated by the fact that most of the stuff they were copying and pasting is broken or sub optimal in some way. If they prompt claude "write me a function", and then when it's broken they prompt "fix the broken function", they're learning (and doing!) a lot less.
Yeah, I really wish all the people whining about Codeberg would give us all pointers to free alternatives that don't have these restrictions.
And, if those alternatives don't exist, well, you now understand why Codeberg is taking the position they are.
The problem I see with the change in their rules is that they have created an unenforceable or worse arbitrarily enforced rule.
There is no sure way to identify LLM code. I could write a project by hand with all the GPT "mannerisms" for fun. I could sign my commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" because my cat's name is Claude and I find it funny.
Now this rule will either be never applied or when it's applied it will be an arbitrary decision made with mostly inconclusive "evidence". This is not a good way to write rules.
Write rules based on merit. Excessive data usage or licensing problems might come to mind. These things are measurable. Otherwise it's really just posturing.
Also, the there are hundreds of ways to use these tools. From semi-intelligent autocomplete to fully agent-driven. Where's the line? What if I had an LLM clean up a fairly long stored procedure? Is that single action now forbidding me from ever uploading that code base to Codeberg? What if no other part of my code was written using LLMs?
> Now this rule will either be never applied or when it's applied it will be an arbitrary decision made with mostly inconclusive "evidence".
Or people just lie. Which is the whole problem with not having a strong way to determine code's origin. And it's also a tad ridiculous because if done correctly, the seams between my thoughts and those of the agent shouldn't be apparent. If it's utilizing existing patterns in my codebase that I've written by hand, then you wouldn't even know.
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
There was also a discussion on the codeberg forum. Anyway, I hope this new rule will be overturned in the future. I think it invites arbitrariness and besides, whether or not a project was vibecoded (and how much) doesn't really decide how useful or even how well-written it is.
So I voted against, partly because I feel that the text doesn't to justice to such a multifaceted topic.
If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me.
But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer
We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need.
I feel like we are already there. I am not vibecoding a lot, but I certainly use LLM-assisted coding now for most of my work. Once you go beyond vibe coding, an LLM feels a lot like a compiler from your well-specified ideas to code. So, to some extend, these restrictions feel like disallowing a higher-level programming language in a time when everyone was still writing machine code.
I understand where this decision is coming from (especially because they have been under attack by LLM bots) and it is well within their right, but the vague language adds a lot of uncertainty:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line? In such cases a project 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools', but the quality is probably not worse than fully hand-written code, especially because an LLM is often more able to 'think' of all kinds of corner cases.
I have some projects on Codeberg and donate monthly, but I have to reconsider both, since with this change Codeberg does not really align with how I work anymore. The projects that I have on Codeberg are largely human-written, but certainly use LLM-assistance for new code.
At any rate, I guess I'm back to GitHub until I have found a better alternative.
> It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line?
My impression is that they don‘t care, it’s still ”slop” for them and for most of coderbergers for that matter.
But I do exactly this. It‘s a code base that I have written prior manually, before LLMs, so now this helps a lot with boilerplate and add features. LLM-assisted is not vibe-coding, but FWIW I don‘t care what others think.
I think your impression is right, at least judging by https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware .
A big seal of quality because it is human written? Maybe in narrow spaces but in general, I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI. It’s codebergs infra so their choice, but it seems like an overly simplistic solution to a complicated advancing technology, in that it is a threadbare line between “vibe-coded” and “complex agent harness with human oversight and review”.
Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI.
I'd take that bet if it was measured in "bugs per day" instead of "bugs per LOC". LLMs generate far fewer bugs in absolute terms, but they also generate far more code, so it probably balances out if everything is equal. I think LLMs will actually lead to more bugs just because they're usually working with poorly defined requirements (prompts) and they guess to fill in the gaps based on the averages of their training data. A lot of those guesses are wrong.
Where LLMs win though is the severity. An LLM will write buggy code in the sense that it doesn't do what you wanted it, but not so much in the sense of security or data loss bugs. They get that right more than humans because they're trained to care about that stuff. There's far more "how to write good code" content in the training data than "how to not care about security and go fast" content (because writing that would be weird!)
You’d take the bet if you could completely choose a different set of parameters? At no point did I say every line of a vibe-coded project in its entirety is better than every line of every repository created by humans, or anything of the sort.
You also go on to admit that the direct quality of the code is likely to better when written by AI — exactly the basis of what I argued — but wish to disagree with what I argued? An interesting position that I don’t quite follow.
The point was that using “human” as an indicator of “code quality” is nonsense. I get CB reasoning for disallowing “vibe-coded” apps when talking about the junk that people are constantly updating/building/deploying for an audience of none, wasting resources. Totally sensible from that perspective, but it takes a baby with the bath water approach that all vibe-coding is bad. I’m simply saying the point of view “if AI then bad, if human then good” isn’t grounded in reality and that your average developer is not producing high quality, well structured, well organized, well documented code. On average, it could be even odds as to whether that developer primarily works on Wordpress.
> I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI.
I'd put money on the average AI-coded project being of a worse quality, simply because the number of vibe-coders with no experience now outnumbers actual coders using AI-assist around 10 to 1.
I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
AI on average might write better code, but there's no way AI prompted by a shoe salesman is going to be better than code written by a person with even 2x years of experience.
If that were the comparison I made — that a non-developer vibe-coding is better than a developer — sure, I’d see your point.
I think, perhaps, my point is that at this rate, pretty soon there won't be any non-vibed projects.
Even those devs that are currently overseeing are gradually atrophying their critical thinking skills in this space.
I'm not saying you can't be happy with autogenerated software, especially for something like a dictation app where the main functionality amounts to a language selector (or calling into a detector) and calling TTSlibary.render(String text).play(). You could also just use an existing TTS app, but whatever works for you
For more complex software, so far it has been my experience that you get more predictable behavior (fewer edge-cases), performance, and relevant (but, to be fair, less comprehensive) documentation when someone thought about and built it
For software that became popular, sure. Have you spent a lot of time looking at horribly written unpopular software that far outpaces the popular ones in quantity, not quality?
I fully agree that a well-written human application can be far better organized and documented. But I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on, but rather the bottom 90% that get far fewer eyes and are way more poorly written, regardless of perceived complexity.
Hah, that's a unique argument. I haven't before been quizzed on how much time I spend with unpopular software. Do you have a minute? xD I think I use more unpopular software than 99% of the world population. Besides that it's part of my job to security test what are usually internal applications (every ~two weeks a new one), I also use basically only software from F-Droid and the Debian repositories, pulling only the apps from the Play Store from (semi) governments where it's unpractical to get by without them. Besides that, a lot of what I use is self-written, with number of users at most a few hundred, biasing heavily towards one. Yes, I'm familiar with hobby coding projects thank you very much :D
> I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on
I’m glad we're on the same page then :)
I have all the time in the world for interesting topics of debate. I’ve equally reviewed quite a lot of poorly written tools, libraries, and APIs in the search for far less mainstream solutions to complex problems; guess our conclusions on what quality we found differ, which is the human experience.
Like I said, I’m not claiming AI outperforms in quality in all cases; it can be just as bad as human code can be. I just disagree with the idea that “human written” is a proxy for “quality code” in my experience.
Human written is not a proxy of good code. But human written and published on a hosting platform (with the additional artifacts like docs, build system, tests) are generally good. While LLM may generate all of these, but they are slop.
I'd rather read bad poetry written by a person than anything generated by a machine.
Even if an LLM generates "good" poetry, it did not, it mashed up elements of good poetry previously written by people, but stripped of all attribution, and stripped of all intents and insights of those original authors.
Since software has a function besides pure art, it's tempting to think of it as actually nothing but function, and so it doesn't matter how a functional thing comes about, merely that it functions. But I say there is more to software than that, and I'd rather not spend my own time and attention on things that no one else spent any of their own time and attention on.
Maybe codeberg is reacting too crudely, so maybe I don't defend them or this action fully in it's current form, but there is nothing ridiculous about the concept of a human-only filter being a seal of quality. The quality isn't the code all works the best, the quality is it's all human.
> imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today)
I have no idea how you'd quantify that, but they're pretty good already. At least in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
I share everybody's concern about many aspects of LLMs; copyright, data collection, energy use, component prices, not to mention what it does to us: outsourcing our thinking, dependency, slop. And I don't entirely disagree wanting to limit that.
And yet, I have just written a library that I was planning to put on Codeberg, but I've used a lot of LLM assistance for it, because it's simply too big otherwise. I put a lot of effort on code quality and architecture, and I don't think this counts as slop, but I do think it violates Codeberg's new rule, so I guess I'll have to look for another place.
No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
> No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
Perhaps https://radicle.dev or https://tangled.org would be fine for you?
Is that a code repository built on top of the protocol underneath bluesky? Fascinating idea.
Radicle uses its own P2P protocol - Gossip. Indeed, Tangled uses the same protocol as Bluesky - ATProto. https://forgefed.org, on the other hand, is based on the ActivityPub protocol, like Mastodon, PeerTube and Pixelfed.
If you could have built it yourself but it was just too much work for the available time, then I trust that indeed the architecture will be sound and it sounds to me like it should be fine to build this way and host on Codeberg... until this amendment :/. I feel sorry that I'm part of this organisation that just shut the door on you
How's your appetite for self hosting? I've only ever hosted the predecessor of Forgejo, Gitea, and that was a breeze. Sadly I'm not aware of other open source hosting platforms, like, if you search "forgejo is confirmed" (with quotes) you find a lot of instances, but the point of Codeberg was the (presumed) longevity
I was hoping my library is useful enough to enough people that a community would form around it. Self hosting doesn't sound like a good way to do that.
I'll have a look at Gitea. Otherwise it's probably going to be Github. Or I'll self host until I find something better.
I had a project on there. The vote result was clearly already a foregone conclusion the moment it was announced. Any voices that even asked for clarification were shouted down on multiple forums. I had never joined as a formal community member to get involved in voting on there, but saw no point in doing so prior to the vote. The tone on external forums (Mastodon, etc.) was just brutal, and the discussion on the PR confined and curtailed.
I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this:
Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there.
Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process.
And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off.
That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group.
... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.
Troubling, though I see it's a typical internet half-off-topic discussion. What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?
> What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?
The original reply that closes the issue is this:
> This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org
Make of the room topic what you will.
> I also don't know how many members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"
Was that actually the subject of the email? If so that's nuts.
Sorry, I didn't mean to give the impression that was literal. I just assume that's how most people read the proposal. Looking it up, the email was:
> Subject: New poll on polls.codeberg.org
> A new poll has been created on polls.codeberg.org:
> Poll Question:
> Disallow vibe-coded projects (Terms of Use amendment) Do you agree to the changes from the Pull Request https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files being accepted?
> Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://...
> This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file.
> [some more info about how to use your token]
The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
Extremely tangential, but:
> As highlighted by [...], status quo for now due to being sent for voting, minor edits can be made by the board/presidium if the text generally passes.
It's fascinating to me how relatively unknown projects like these have very fancy governance terms like board and presidium for what amounts to a handful of people in a private Discord DM discussing a text document. It's kinda like bureaucracy larping.
Nobody is LARPing an Eingetragener Verein, they're just being one, and the law requires them to have a board and presidium.
As they got hundreds of votes on the issue, that means tens of thousands of euros in membership contributions. It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to create a legal entity for that, and an e.V. is easier to set up in the beginning (although it can lead to a lot of drama later).
I believe you, but it still gives the outside impression of nerds taking themselves quite seriously. Leave it to the Germans to be tediously bureaucratic, I suppose?
Germany requires e.Vs to have democratic governance as a response / reaction to what happened during WW2, where every organization was retooled to run under "Führerprinzip" aka, one person decides everything, zero democracy or accountability. Reconstruction decided this was really fucking bad, and made all organizations required to be the polar opposite
You are American? American non profit associations must have officers and a board of directors.
I am, and I'm sure there are rules for non-profits in the US that are just as tedious! Like I said in a different comment, I didn't realize Codeberg had a whole German non-profit thing behind it.
This tends to be necessary as soon as you move any non trivial amount of money around. You can't get a bank account without some bureaucratic overhead
https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm is a good look at why taking themselves seriously enough to have a formal governance structure is a good thing for a healthy organisation of any sort.
I have German background, so that was a genuine concern for me when I started using Codeberg 3 years ago. It's not a great surprise that they end up being more interested in rulemaking around FOSS hosting than in FOSS hosting itself.
Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved.
The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend.
Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
I think German non profit organizations are required by law to have a certain level of governance structure.
Ah, interesting! I didn't realize they were German, and didn't realize it's a non-profit as well. I thought it was just an open source project and that was that. That would explain the bureaucracy.
Codeberg already had relatively strong opinions before that; their Terms of Use also says:
"the right to use the content for any purpose, including both commercial and non-commercial purposes" "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"
So yes, "the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken", nothing really new actually.
IMHO, deciding to migrate because of a disagreement that doesn't have practical consequences on the author is a bit of an overreaction. It is not, by the way, a full ban on LLM, as the clause says mostly LLM-generated, a term that has been criticized for its vagueness in other places, but that does leaves some room for thoughtful use.
But why stop using a service we are satisfied with because of virtual future other decisions that might or might not affect us? It's like if people left their country before the candidate for president they fear, is even elected.
It's always amusing to see people concern troll about slippery slopes as if Codeberg didn't already have requirements (some vibes based) for the repositories they host. But people hate change and will knee-jerk react to announcements like these. It reminds me of the absolute meltdowns people have over Rust in Linux (remember the hysteria when Rust became a hard dependency for apt?).
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
> many ‘vibe coders’ are annoying, negative net value assholes
Where on Earth does this sentiment come from? I've had people make AI contributions to my open-source projects and while they may be perhaps less technical on average they're every bit as well intentioned - possibly moreso since they're interested in improving the project rather than establishing a little fiefdom.
> AI contributions
using AI is not vibe coding. the difference is whether a developer takes responsibility and the according measures before releasing/contributing or not.
I agree with the distinction between using a LLM as a tool to make personal contributions to healthy projects and expecting Codeberg to host arbitrary slop, but I'm afraid you are assuming good faith.
The "developer" could be a bot, or a tool-assisted criminal or activist, and they might be using LLMs to enhance their ability to add stealthy malware, plant patent or copyright violations, impose not quite shared technical choices, and so on.
Many open source projects ban AI contributions just because they are an efficiently low effort way to waste the time of the actual maintainers.
Well I think they are probably well intentioned and annoying... and possibly net negative but I'll reserve judgement on that.
E.g. I've had people find genuine bugs and then basically paste their entire Claude conversation into the issue. Very annoying.
yes, but as freedom of expression allows 'assholes' to say whatever they want, free software also allows 'assholes' to develop whatever they want - and limiting it while position itself as the lighthouse of freedom makes Codeberg people the actual assholes
Freedom of expression does not mean my non-profit has to spend its resources to give you a platform. I'm not a member of Codeberg eV, but i strongly approve their decision. We need more hosts with a mission, especially when it comes to AI and promoting human-crafted resources.
I feel that decades of dumping by VC and advertisement supported platforms have really lead to massive entitlement. People really feel that they should have full right to use any amount of "free" resources for anything. Even if they are the only ones using it.
For resource limited platform selecting their focus is just right. It would be like running food bank in some extremely rich neighbourhood. And people living there complaining of not getting caviar and Japanese wagyu...
Freedom of expression, as defined in the US, sure. But not everybody in the internet shares the definition.
E.g. as a European my idea of freedom of speech is not limited to the things I am allowed to say, but also about whether spaces exist in which I can say them. US style freedom of speech, doesn't produce any more insightful or free discourse than over here. In fact I'd argue it produces a discourse where voices win that are the loudest, most outrageous and least respectful, while voices that are more reasonable are frightened away.
It is the same thing that happens if a state gives up her monopoly of violence: The strongest dominate, while the weaker, more peaceful ones suffer.
Freedom is not just the freedom to do X, it is also the freedom of not having X done to you, as well as the freedom of living in a space where doing X is actually possible.
This means a free society does not have to endure all voices, especially those that aim at harming others or have the goal of using freedom of speech to get rid of the free society. Don't like the rules of a free society? Then you don't get to easily claim the protections granted by one. You can't whine to the referee if your goal is to get rid of the referee — I mean you could, but that would be pathetic.
Free speech in the US is about protecting citizens freedom from government harm for their speech. That's all. We can agree government shouldn't punish their citizens for their speech?
You're free to be an asshole all day and all night if. I'd respect that, looking at you from the top window of my lighthouse of freedom.
I don't have to let you in, feed you and offer you a bed for the night. You can be free out there.
Migrated to it around 3 years ago. All I needed was a dependable and simpler (preferably EU-based) GitHub alternative for my FOSS code. Now I am migrating away and stopped my donations to the e.V. Not because I have cryptocurrency-related or vibecoded projects (I don't), but because this sets precedent of introducing vague rules that ban random/unpopular projects.
Ironically, I migrated to it from SourceHut because of similar rules introduced there.
> Now I am migrating away
Where to, if I may ask? Are there any stable FOSS-emphasizing (preferably EU-based) alternatives (outside of just self-hosting)?
I can't find similar rules at SourceHut, can you point to them?
They use Anubis and block LLM scraping, but that sounds useful to me!
Drew's antics should be enough of a reason not to be a part of it tbh...
Not sure how Anubis plays with SourceHut trying to be js-free, but otherwise it's awesome.
SourceHut prohibits anything cryptocurrency- or blockchain-related, so it's less restrictive now, but I didn't like this random opinionated addition to ToS back then and Codeberg felt like a nice alternative.
I don't know you, but my feeling is you have the wrong analysis grid here. This is a non-profit taking a stand for what's right in a world where everything's wrong. The discussion has been ongoing for several years, and the rules introduced are not vague, and do not target random/unpopular projects.
I personally have trust in the human community behind codeberg. I understand if you don't. But my question is: why go with a non-profit host if you're not going to get involved in the governance? Of course governance is always happening in a project. For me, that power is shared and decisions are transparent are a criterium to trust codeberg even more.
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.
> 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.
I think it's a bad example since your private GitLab instance wasn't all over the HN earlier screaming "are you tired of Github outages and Microslop breaking it every day? Migrate all your shit to Codeberg, the good guys of the internet" only to later pull the rug like this.
Private stuff is cool and there's place for it. Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative and it's currently failing miserably at this.
I swear HN has some sort of Mandela effect about Codeberg's mission. Their website clearly states they're a community-led non-profit that hosts like-minded FOSS projects, and their FAQ directly asks you to host private repos somewhere else.
Yet the amount of comments in this site proposing them as a GitHub alternative for individuals and companies, and suggesting them to move their repos there is absurd, and not enough people correct them.
Do yourself a favor and look at the actual HN thread [1] when Codeberg was widely discussed for the first time. It is crystal clear that Codeberg was seen as a direct alternative to GitHub at that time, and even the founder's quoted statement gave a nod to that I think?
> [...] But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. [...]
(And no one knew Codeberg had a right to determine which source code and documentation is invaluable.)
I just did, in fact I vaguely remembered it from back then, and after reading the announcement blog post and the quote, I still think that anyone who expected Codeberg to replace their private use of GitHub was fantasizing. They already stated their mission is to be a community-led forge for FOSS.
Maybe we could blame them for having lowered their ambitions around "lesser" FOSS, but then again the economics are changing.
Even looking at the comments from that thread and the Codeberg page at that time in archive.org, I don't really see much that points to it as a proper GitHub alternative, other than the editorialized (I think) post title.
Which I think might be the cause of confusion here. I suspect that there was never an official statement (or intention) of Codeberg being a full GitHub replacement, but since a lot of people recommended it as an alternative to GitHub, it started to be seen that way.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, though, as I'm quite confused about the outrage about Codeberg's decision. At least in my mind, Codeberg was already a highly opinionated forge (with the private repo ban and all), so this was not much of a surprise.
That thread is from 2020.
Times change.
Free services owe no one, anything. If you are joining a community, be respectful.
If you're not, and you get banned, that sucks. If it causes a whole category of your peers to be banned that sucks too.
…but its a bit rich to say, oh yeah, the promises you made before LLMs were a thing didn't include a note saying “except if you spam AI generated code”.
Come on.
They dont owe anyone anything.
Certainly not for some comment from ten years ago.
This could entirely legitimately be a case of “was this decision made the right way according to their own decision making process?” … but “is it ok for then to have made this decision?”
Yes. Its fine. It’s their platform. They can do whatever they want.
The OP said the Mandela effect [1] which is definitely about the past event. Anyhow, I'm okay with Codeberg's decision (I'm not even its stakeholder, so what can I say about that anyway) but it has to be honest about the intent. If its definition of "F/OSS" has changed, do say so.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
The terms and conditions second point is "Allowed Content & Usage", and has been for a good 4 years, no one who's part of the organization would say it's a "drop-in GitHub alternative". It's not a "anything goes" git host either.
>> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
> What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
Codeberg's getting started documentation has the line, "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." [1]
[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/
Nothing in that quote suggests that it's an "almost drop-in" replacement for Github.
As an illustrative example: Proton is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement.
I'm genuinely confused by how often people make up something in their mind, get upset about it, and then angrily post an attack on the thing they made up in their mind. How does that happen? Aren't there enough upsetting real-world things already?
Can you point me at the posts where Codeberg was suggesting this? I just ran a quick search of Codeberg-related HN posts from the last year, and while there are some instances of "why I moved my stuff to Codeberg" I wasn't able to find anything from the platform begging people to move. I believe you there could be examples, but that doesn't seem to be representative of the discussion.
At a macro level, this is always going to be a struggle for projects that are an alternative to enshittified corporate services. Hosting costs money. It seems like the real solution here is to work on the problem of federation between forges.
> 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 think Codeberg was never intended for one-off individual projects in the first place, such as them discouraging private repositories. Quoting their Terms of Use [0]:
> 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. [...]
And this makes a ton of sense, because Codeberg is a community-funded volunteer-supported non-profit, and it doesn't make sense to spend their resources for repositories that don't benefit the public.
I think "legitimate contributor community" is just an excuse so I am not going to dwell on it. From Ghostty to Redis, rsync to Linux kernel, more and more FOSS projects are taking advantage of various AI tools in a responsible manner and closing the door on them is just unfortunate and backward in my opinion. We gain nothing from this change and lose a ton of progress in software freedom and digital commons.
> 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.
Of course, and the bigger community gets to discuss their decision. :)
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
Eh, I release my own one-off individual projects as FOSS. The entire point of FOSS and how most of the common FOSS originated was all one-off individual project. Even Linus created Linux because he could for himself (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/how-l...), and not because he wanted to invent a mailing list bureaucracy to blow his spare time.
Codeberg setting such a high bar means FOSS is dead unless you are a company spending millions to fund something from day zero.
I didn't look into codeberg really and didn't follow any discussions around it, except some projects fleeing to codeberg.
At the first glance it just looks like a github competitor. Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
I think that is a clear communication problem. Maybe the times are chaotic for them and they need to figure out how to position themselves. But appearing as just another github and expecting people to be reasonable with it's usage, is unreasonable on their side.
> ... Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
By registering for a Codeberg account, you consent to our Privacy Policy [1] and agree to our Terms of Use. [2]
[0] <https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up>
[1] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/PrivacyPolicy.md>
> Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient
I'm sure that if we were talking about a corporate entity, then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS" and "most ToSes are unenforceable", and guess what? In a world where significant AI assistance is becoming common, finding out which project is AI generated or even knowing the level of AI assistance is well nigh impossible and could be very well unenforceable.
Edit: It has come to my attention that Codeberg is a registered association[1]. It would be "fun" to see them argue about how they may argue that an AI assisted project has "harmed their reputation".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
> ...then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS"...
This is unrelated to OP's claims that Codeberg not only doesn't make it clear that they "[P]rovide the essential infrastructure and organizational framework for the development of Open-Source Projects in decentralized and global communities, and other endeavours which serve this mission." and that "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.", but that Codeberg is unreasonable for not making that clear.
OP's assertions are why I said
Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
Eh? Codeberg's remedy is to cancel your account and attempt to ban you if you attempt to keep coming back and doing the things that got your account canceled. Do you intend to suggest that a European or USian court would disagree that Codeberg is permitted to do this?
I do think the author is right that the Codeberg post was wrong to assert that "community" is a measure of the legitimacy of a FOSS project
A massive amount of technology runs on essentially single-contributor projects with pretty much no "community": xz, core-js, GnuPG, NTPd, OpenSSL, cURL
They didn't need to make that implication or alienate solo devs in order to drive home their point
I think "community" and "contributor community" are getting conflated here (and I made the same mistake in my original comment).
All of the projects you cited certainly have a large user community.
> 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.
Codeberg is not saying that solo developers don't belong. Codeberg is saying that they exist for projects that contribute to an open source commons, and that spending money on hosting projects that use a lot of resources but don't meaningfully contribute to that commons isn't something they want to do. It seems like their intent here is practical, not philosophical. If servers and electricity grew on trees, they might very well would not have had to even had this discussion.
Many influential F/OSS projects started with a small number of users (and contributors), and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Codeberg effectively says that it only welcome mature enough projects that it feels worthy to host, and that's selfish. That's not a direct problem by itself but still a good reason to get criticized.
> Codeberg effectively says that it only welcome mature enough projects that it feels worthy to host
This is also one of the reasons I migrated away.
> Many influential F/OSS projects started with a small number of users (and contributors), and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
They also start very small in terms of resources consumption.
Another practical application would have been if they would have charged for CI - by the minutes - for projects with no user or contributor community.
That would be a commercial activity. Codeberg is a non-profit host. I'm not familiar with german law but i assume non-profits can have some commercial activity (as long as they don't compete with commercial actors), but that would open an entire can of worms.
I think the path they chose is better: stay on their mission to provide free services to FLOSS projects who need it.
Uh, I thunk you’re underestimating the community around most of those. BDFL doesn’t mean single-contributor.
> 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.
Yeah, it feels so good to know my AGPLv3 free software projects are illegitimate because I haven't managed to build a community around them yet. They don't matter, they're just "one-off" individual projects. Literally prompting and shipping Fable oneshots here.
This is a bit of a drama take - there's nothing "illegitimate" with your project, Codeberg just doesn't want it.
And that's ok, noone owes you free hosting.
Codeberg market themselves as not just a host but a community, so mass banning projects that didn't do anything wrong and were previously operating within the rules feels more like rejection from a community rather than a business decision made of necessity, especially the way the decision came about via some quasi-democratic process.
Codeberg is a German e.V. claiming significant benefits from society, including tax-free status.
The argument “they can do whatever they want” doesn’t hold water. They are using legal privileges that other institutions don’t have, based on the assumption that they operate for the public benefit. I’m not saying that their current rules automatically mean they don’t live up to that claim, but it’s certainly worth a discussion.
I agree with this and I think it's the right way to think about it. They have the right to create their community as they want to. No one is forced to use them.
If a gitea instance only wants to offer free hosting only for rust projects, that's their right. I think the problem here is that codeberg was seen as a GitHub replacement and people were expecting the same openness, even if it was restricted only to open source projects.
It's absolutely Codeberg's right to do this, but I only wish that they had been more clear about this earlier, because now I have to move all my repos to my own forge.
I also do consider it to be extremely disappointing that my FOSS projects under approved licences are not welcome because they don't have a community, even if they are taking only hundreds of kilobytes of disk space and bandwidth.
Codeberg's website currently says it hosts "650198 projects". How many of those are solo programmers or projects without a significant community? I suspect if they were to enforce their policy they would only have several hundred projects on the platform in total. That being said, I'm not taking chances that my repos might be nuked at any time so I have no choice but to move.
I moved my projects to Codeberg 3 years ago because it promoted itself as a host for FOSS, and I was starting to think that GitHub was not going to remain a dependable FOSS host. All of mine are one-man itch-scratching that I am willing to share with others. None so far contain any LLM-assisted work.
A couple weeks ago I froze them, when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 came up. Not because of the LLM policy as such, but because this thread https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 convinced me that Codeberg can not be a dependable FOSS host. It's controlled by non-developers who don't have software development anywhere near the top of their priorities.
Same, the vibe I got from Codeberg was "Kumbaya everyone, come build free software here away from The Man spying on you". According to many HN commenters today it was always meant for serious projects and they don't want to waste money hosting your hobby side projects.
They should consider removing the word "hobbyists" from their homepage to avoid confusion if that's the case. When I think of hobbyist programmers, it could be someone making the trillionth todo app or vim extension, not maintaining curl.
Thanks for linking that thread, it told me everything I needed to know.
That thread is fascinating, to say the least.
It really highlights why I have avoided Mastodon entirely.
Only fascists avoid Mastodon.
That means the vast majority of people are born as fascists and only the mastodonians are the ones going against the fascist nature of this world.
Not sure how that is supposed to help the anti-fascist cause.
Should have added a sarcasm tag.
You almost had me there for a second, but I picked up on it before the downvoters did.
I think it's an unfortunate reality whenever you have a network which is popularized by a boycott of other services' actions or values. Those who care the most or are the most affected by the actions are the most likely to leave and be very vocal in the new space, so the new space becomes "theirs." Meanwhile, the original space(s) still keep a lot of the old users who are supportive, ignorant, or ambivalent, so both places become a little more echoed and extreme.
When Reddit ditched 3rd party clients and generally enshittified, I didn't jump ship to Lemmy. I reinstalled an RSS reader and made HN one of the feeds.
Are these the people "controlling" it or just an adjacent channel (which excepted a few pinko CCC type people like the OP seems reasonable)?
Anyway, if the earlier https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha... didn't inform you concerning the kind of people running the show, I don't know what to tell you...
> 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.
And the author is wrong. Nothing in the ban on heavy LLM-assisted projects + crypto and the subsequent blog post[0] is suggesting that Codeberg is against solo projects without community.
If you read the post[0] carefully and not using AI-summaries or assuming context from HN/Reddit/X comments you'll see that they are calling out specifically projects that overuse resources that are meant to be equally shared. For projects with large communities, that is expected, but solo projects with zero effective users spinning CI 20 hours a day and uploading many hundreds megabytes of code daily is just plain being an asshole.
When AI bros see words "free", they usually respond with "all for me?". But that's not how that works in most places, or atleast it's not sustainable.
Also note that Codeberg specifically said that while it's against terms, they are not going to scan for LLM-written code or pressure people to delete their small, low-resource-using repos.
[0] - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
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):
I feel like it's a bit ironic that the blog post chastises Codeberg for taking a stance and then does the same with JS.
The whole blog post is also taking a stance. What is criticized is the specific stance taken by Codeberg. TFA seems to state that Codeberg should allow projects of all kinds to be hosted on their service (though apparently artificially limiting their resources would be alright).
I find it endearing that someone is keeping up the resistance against JavaScript. Used things like noscript myself since 2008 or so. Eventually gave up since nearly no website would work that way and served you captcha loops instead.
They warn against JavaScript being on by default and recommend using it only on trusted websites. It's a solid advice.
I still use NoScript. I actually started in 2018. I will turn on 1 or 2 js sites for a respectable looking page, but blank screens and captchas are a good signal to bounce, or occasionally to use an incognito window which enables all JS.
As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.
You gave up because the anti JavaScript position is completely insane and unreasonable?
The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.
The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.
I thought it was funny at first and kept clicking away to see what other random changes I'd get, but then I got a "Zuckerberg nudes" Google search webpage and I'm on my work computer...
Fortunately this functionality doesn't change your browser history, but it did really annoy me for a bit
Interestingly, nothing happens in my case, even after unblocking JS on their site. I suppose it's because I do block JS by default.
> 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 :)
> 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.
It's different conceptions of freedom. For some, the freedom to oppress is not freedom at all, and building non-free software is oppressive.
> 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
Yes, clicking makes it go away! It's an overlay that opens when you leave the page, saying you should really not run Javascript programs sent by the web server because they can do pretty much anything.
> it's for FOSS
It is for FOSS, but they seem to be more restrictive now than even that, and I don't mean by LLMs. To quote their blog post: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice: > > 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 do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.
The new terms [0] say “You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools […]. Such projects having an unclear copyright status […]”
So okay, if you're concerned about the risk of liability from unclear copyright status, I suppose that's fine, but then why the “mostly”? It's not like the copyright status becomes less unclear by you supplementing with 50% hand-written code.
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
> then why the “mostly”?
Because it's all vibes, all the way down. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced. If they get bad vibes from your project, they kick you out.
Its not the real reason. Copyright law varies with jurisdiction, is not simply if its AI written its not covered" anywhere AFAIK, and the and the reasons given in the blog post do have anything to do with copyright.
There is a certain amount of fuzzy thinking, but I think what is significant about this is that Codeberg is not a neutral place for FOSS software. It is a place for FOSS that Codeberg considers good - so no LLM code, no crypto related code, and no doubt more to come. I think it feels odd to people because its a different set of values to FOSS licences which are designed to be apolitical and neutral - a software license that stated that the software could not be used for crypto or in LLM projects would not be a FOSS license.
I would love to use something that isn't GitHub for code hosting.
Codeberg sounds great, but from using it day-to-day, it's really slow sometimes, and frequently times out (from Perth, AU, if it matters). This is not just the SSH protocol for git pushes, but also for browsing.
(I do have a self-hosted forgejo (came from gitea), it's great, Postgres database backs up, files are easy to backup, it's also git so I can just mirror it elsewhere as well.). I love their self-hosted runners is super simple to host.
Bit random, but for code search, does anyone have any recommendations?
My current process is to just `git clone <REPO>` onto my server, then use ripgrep (Can't beat good ol' plain text search).
The result is that this is hundreds of GB -- I like to clone everything I use, dependencies etc, to then be able to look at source code. (I use quite a few languages/ecosystems, and sometimes reading the source code is the best way to figure something out).
I've tried Sourcebot (just for the code search, I don't care about "MCP"/"AI") etc, but was wondering if anyone has recommendations.
GitHubs code search is great, but it doesn't find everything, and it is also incredibly rate limited (annoying when trying to narrow something down, and you then get rate limited). I use this when trying to figure out random Apple issues - someone somewhere has figured it out usually.
Tooting my own horn here for search but give https://github.com/boyter/cs a go. You can have a http server up if you like (even modify the templates) and have it sync your repos for you on a schedule you define.
Let me know if it fails in some area and I’ll fix it.
You can just self-host GitLab CE and use self-hosted ElasticSearch integration to set up code search. I really don't understand the point of Forgejo, sounds like making your life harder
For the forgejo side of things, this is for my own projects. Not hosting others (or for their code search, this was for mine).
For context, forgejo does have [code search](https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/search/code-search/), which is simple to enough.
I like forgejo/gitea - a single app.ini, postgres for the database. Done through a docker compose.
Last time I ran gitlab, it required oodles of memory - it's just me!
> You can just self-host GitLab CE and use self-hosted ElasticSearch integration to set up code search. I really don't understand the point of Forgejo, sounds like making your life harder
Sounds like more steps/maintenance/hassle and a more complicated than just using forgejo for my own personal projects, forgejo uses <120MB of memory for me, has runners, etc.
That's all good until you discover that Forgejo is very barebones compared to GitLab, and you inevitably end up recreating GitLab featureset by using some scripts/addons from random people and pray it doesn't shit itself
Isn't it better to invest your time in setting up GitLab once and not have to deal with Forgejo being a toy project?
It literally takes 1 compose.yaml to self-host GitLab Omnibus, and 1 compose.yaml for the runner. You have been misled by suckless fans if you think that self-hosting GitLab is more complex than Forgejo.
> Last time I ran gitlab, it required oodles of memory - it's just me!
It requires what, 8GB of RAM? That's not "oodles" by any definition.
If I ever need anything more advanced than what Forgejo is offering me, I'd reach for Gitlab, for sure. :-)
> 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.
> Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet.
There's a reason these came to be in the first place though, and accounts are among the most prominent ones. A new forum means not just registering at yet another place, it also means creating a new label/folder in your email inbox and a new filter rule to properly redirect stuff. That's friction.
> 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.
Is anyone else extremely annoyed with the way this is written? To me it reeks of paternalistic arrogance that simultaneously exposes the author's armchair psychological headcanon about how they imagine people to work with LLMs.
Except that it's true. It feels good to use them, to feel productive, and that is addictive.
That's the hard truth: Vibe coders are addicted to using LLMs. You're going to reject that. You're now going straight to typing up a response about how I'm wrong. But addicts often cannot accept they are addicts. It's why the first step is always recognizing you have a problem, because even that is a hard step.
Tech is full of people who think they're smarter than everyone else, which, as always, makes you more susceptible to addiction. If you think "I'm smart, I can't get addicted. I can tell the difference." then no. No you can't.
> Tech is full of people who think they're smarter than everyone else
Thanks for offering yourself as a prime example.
> 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.
> a hub built around “free software” is now telling its users which kinds of software are deemed good and which are not, and that is closer to censorship than it might seem. Once a platform writes into its terms that an entire category “harms its reputation” and can be removed on that basis, the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken.
To me, this is the key point: Service providers should be neutral. Especially ones claiming to be free as in freedom.
Only get involved insofar as it is required by law, and stay out of it otherwise. Individuals can have their opinions and biases, but keep them out of the platforms.
Providers should host whatever they feel like hosting. Models were nost likely trained on stolen content, so not allowing vibecoded is taking a stance in favour of free software.
You people keep forgetting that free software is inherintly political and so platforms are more than wellcome of taking a stance. If you don't like don't use it. Quite simple
Free software is about freedom and liberty. Sure, you can decide to prohibit certain use cases. That is absolutely legal and absolutely okay to do. But it makes you non-neutral and non-free.
Just because you are making free software doesn't mean you should get everything for free.
What? Free software was never neutral. You think Stallman and Torvalds did what they did because they were neutral?
If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?
By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions
Same. I moved to codeberg because of the non-commercial and "freedom" aspects. I enjoy vibe-coding tools for different applications, e.g. for prompt injection research. Now I will probably move back to Github. I accept this decision but I am quite disappointed by the ideology and black & white view. LLMs are a fascinating technology created by us humans, and they have the potential to make our life better.
We shall stay curious.
> LLMs are a fascinating technology created by us humans, and they have the potential to make our life better.
Just like forever chemicals. LLMs cause a lot of problems and they should not be disregarded.
> We shall stay curious.
Curiousity is fine. But critical thinking is still advised
Appreciate the comment.
Curiosity and critical thinking are both important when it comes to new technologies, agree.
Agree too that LLMs can cause problems. However, I see a real net plus for me (in comparison, I never understood well why blockchain was so hyped). As a non-developer but with technical background, I can now create my own software tools or modify available tools for my needs; LLMs are also fantastic tutors - this feels like progress. I can imagine that researchers in many disciplines also feel this.
At the same time I am scared, because many of my skills are just obsolete. And the environmental consequences are also "problematic". On the other hand, individual transport and industrial agriculture are (my intuitive take) much worse.
> they have the potential to make our life better
If you're a vegan as your nick suggests, i would suggest to reconsider this point. Capitalism was already bent on sending us towards a 6th mass species extinction (starting right under our noses), but so-called AI has changed the scale and speed of the curb drastically in only a few years. See for example this article for recent Google stats:
https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to...
Recent AI datacenter projects such as Stratos (40000 acres) are on a scale of industrial destruction my mind fails to comprehend.
I'm not 100% vegan, but i'm 100% "AI-vegan", and i definitely would recommend you considering it.
PS: All i said was just about the environmental impact of LLMs. I suspect the human impact to be just as bad (cognitive impairment, accrued exploitation, etc).
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.
When I read this quote I also had to think of this tante person on Mastodon urging their thousands of followers to vote for a certain thing. If one actor like this can possibly impact a small community this way, I'm on the cautious to sceptical side about that community project's future.
I'm sorry but you are completely out of touch with reality. This is a non-profit calling on their members to vote. Non-members didn't have a say, so a random member posting on Mastodon is not going to influence the results in the way that you imply (i.e. trolls raiding an online form).
Also, despite what your remote view suggests, members of non-profits usually have political opinions. Codeberg was founded for political reasons by people with political opinions: the members aren't waiting for someone on Mastodon to have an opinion.
Also, apart from this, people having opinions and encouraging others to defend their opinions is quite normal democratic process in a non-profit. Nothing to see here.
I see multiple people in the replies that all confirm they voted in favor.
I never claimed anyone could vote.
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.
That project just disappearing from your mind is probably for the better. If it was a company doing such an activist rug pull, you probably wouldn't want to deal with them either. That's probably just intuition telling you something.
They could've found so many more legitimate reasons for not wanting pure vibe code on their platform (load, resource constraints, github's uptime since AI assistance became mainstream, etc) but they chose the virtue signalling path instead.
I think Codeberg is well within its rights to offer services in the way that it wants. If customers don't like it they can move & stop paying. Find a host that fits the terms you want and expect. That is what is great about Codeberg, no lockin no scam.
Codeberg is within its right to do what it wants
and users are within their rights to say Codeberg's actions are shitty, could've been done in a better way for same effect, and are problematic enough to raise all sorts of alarms and recommendations of avoiding any positive connotations in the future
This is not entirely true. They are a registered non-profit club. They will lose their non-profit status if tax authority finds violating them https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/ao_1977/__52.html
Then they are just a (commercial) club that has to pay taxes.
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.
[flagged]
Weird thing is: I agree with both of you. Of course they can decide what to host and what not. And it's sad if that excludes me. But insulting small projects like that was uncalled-for.
Did we read the same article?
> 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.
This seems like a staggeringly reasonable take.
Had they limited CI/CD depending on the project "community" (whatever that means), that would be a reasonable take. Instead they ban something tangential to the discussion.
I can publish human slop and use loads of their resources without any LLM use.
Absolutely. I have no complaint with their actual change to the terms of service. I've had an account with them for years, and I stopped hosting new repos there a year or two ago, because I got mixed signals about precisely what kinds of projects they want to host. I don't need a host, plenty of fish in the sea. But I also think the world is better for having them in it and being hardened against enshittification, and I don't want to see them constantly struggling to stay up under assault from LLM crawlers. I wish them well.
I am constantly ill-choosing words I didn't mean, it's not such a big deal.
I think it's mostly a poorly worded change, with odd assertions that one can interpret as "why do you need x feature made for your blog made by Ai just use notepad and apache server for your blog".
The resource point is fair enough but as the blog post says they can make it a paid service for llm folks.
I think it's a bit an
What make Codeberg a legitimate open-source, community driven project is that finally it has some drama ! In all seriousness, I think it's fine to have Codeberg be an opinionated forge. It's a community project, paid for by the community (mostly), at the end of the day the community decide on what they wanna host. Criticism can be addressed about the organization of the vote, and I hope they will ! In any case, if they are not, it will become one of those project that slowly bleed contributor until only a small core of die-hard supported stays, and everybody else has moved on.
I think it is just that people where very naïve about what Codeberg was going to be. Github has their own incentive about who they want to work with, what feature they develop, etc. Codeberg, as a real organization, made up of real people, operating in the real world, is also not free of incentive. It was never going to be this perfectly fine neutral platform for everyone. If you want the freedom to do whatever you want (in you own limitation due to the jurisdiction that apply to you), you have to do it yourself.
Instead of banning all LLM based repositories, they could introduce rules to discourage one shot code dumps. For example, if a repository remains inactive for more than a year, with no commits or other activity, the owner could receive a warning before the repository is removed. I’m seeing hundreds of LLM generated repositories that are published once and then abandoned with no any activity further
The CSS-powered blink tag at the end is like a flashbang from the late 90s
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.
Perhaps they started banning entire categories of projects so their infra could actually work again.
Banning a portion of their community is... one way to reduce server load.
I did when I first saw the change. Then I decided to do something about it and spent the day moving my stuff to my own self hosted Forgejo instance.
Now Codeberg is free to do as it wants as am I.
That's why I have two remotes
origin --> codeberg github --> github
I may add others. Redundancy is a good thing.
I’ve recently moved to sourcehut and really enjoy it so far! While I think the creator has strong personal opinions about LLMs - I don’t think they have any intentions of banning LLM generated projects. Anyhow just wanted to share because I think it’s a really nice product that isn’t overbloated with JS and just gets the thing done.
Think this convinced me to move over.
> We now even have people like Linus Torvalds making the fairly reasonable argument that an LLM is just a tool, and “clearly a useful one”
I don't think this argument is reasonable at all. Many are concerned about the environmental and societal impacts of LLMs, there are many ethical concerns around them as well, there are concerns that they could cause a bubble burst / a major economical crisis. Regardless your opinion on all these things, that's quite the undertaking for "just a tool"! This is unheard of for something like a hammer, for instance.
> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same
Linus Torvalds can be wrong at times, like anyone else.
It's a shame an authority like Linus Torvalds shared this opinion, now people are taking it even more seriously.
He considers technical merit above all else, even above what allows "technique" to exist in the first place. He always have. It might have helped a lot in the success of Linux, but I still think this is deeply flawed.
Whether you love, or hate, or don't care about LLMs, they are not "just a tool".
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.
A little bit offtopic, but I spend 12 USD a month for a 1 high performance core, 2GB ram, 50GB NVME SSD VPS, and slap nginx and cgit config on there, and host my own git repos.
I realize this doesn't work for everyone, and not everyone has the money to spare, but it's really nice to be able to host your own stuff on your own website, and not be tied down to a forge like github or codeberg.
Bonus points if you have the hardware and network capacity to host this at home!
How is it bonus points if you host at home? My big fear is that a fire, etc deletes my data. You're going to need that extra server whether you like it or not.
tarsnap, restic, borgbackup and others are your friend. When you do your own backup, you know it works (well, you have to).
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.
That starting message is not encouraging:
> so many people who have made "coding with an LLM" their whole personality
As opposed to "coding without an LLM" being their whole personality? Neither of these are what a personality is. Comments like thesen are needlessly dismissive and not conducive to a healthy discussion.
Codeberg has every right to set their own standards, but the discussion around it is ugly and dismissive of many well-meaning developers.
> 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.
Doesn't seem to be what they put in their ToS:
>You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
Unless you've defined "responsibly" in a funny way.
> 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.
On Tuesday I was working on my Braille 'N Speak emulator[0], an ancient Z180-based accessible notetaker for the blind. I wanted a z180 emulation library that wasn't z180-emu (GPL) and that I could use on the web via wasm, on my phone, and would have a Python binding.
Of course, this is a perfect sort of job for an agent with a verification loop, so I went off and researched if there were any standard conformance suites for z80/z180. Turns out there are a ton! I wired up my verification loops, fired off /goal, and sat back. Now, I have my library[1].
Was "AI assisted coding" "used responsibly?"
Should this sort of thing be allowed? Why or why not?
It's about control. It's always been about control. The moderators of this project would happily throw you under the bus if you ever in any way displeased them while being an AI user.
I think this is the main drive behind this. Make it easier to get rid of people you don't like/don't welcome on your platform without making it explicit, because that could surface some biases of theirs.
It was always an ideology-driven project. LLM-hating now turned into a mandatory religious ritual for places like codeberg. That‘s fine though, one can self-host forgejo, gitea, gogs and so on. In fact the role of github and places like codeberg to form communities is rapidly diminishing. Even for FOSS it makes more sense to host privately than rely on somebody‘s corporate or emotionally-driven platform management.
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.
Just noticed that there is a filter on repositories "Collaborative". Is this indication that we will not be allowed (immediately or eventually) to store either public or private repositories if we are not collaborating with others?
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.
I don't recall exactly which one has javascript mandatory (namely is gated with 'whatwg cartel' web engines): this very codeberg or sourcehut?
If you wants to make their own forge where LLM-assisted work is prohibited, go ahead. Waiting for people to go all-in on your service and then kicking them out however is frankly rotten thing to do; but entirely expected of Codeberg, which is more a political community than a useful forge.
> Once a platform writes into its terms that an entire category “harms its reputation” and can be removed on that basis, the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken.
The problem in here is German laws, particularly stuff like the "Störerhaftung", and what Codeberg wants is a fast avenue to yeet projects that cause an undue amount of trouble for a non-profit organization.
> 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, through a dark blue banner at the top of the site on the day it was already settled.
You're an ordinary user, not a member of Codeberg e.V., the people running the show. Want to take part in the governance of the association, join in.
The question is why Codeberg needs to be stationed in Germany known for its goofy laws at every corner.
Germany may have goofy laws but a very stable and predictable political environment. That is why there is a long and rich history here - KDE e.V, the ones who run the same-name Linux desktop, SuSE, The Document Foundation (LibreOffice), FSF's European branch, CCC, Open Knowledge Foundation, Open Search Foundation... and that's just the most prominent ones.
In general, these rules have been known for a very long time, boiled down it is "don't be a dick and don't allow others to use your property to be a dick" in law. Of course, for Americans who are used to acting like dicks with impunity towards each other and everyone else, this being coded in law is anathema.
In Germany you can't leave a 3 star review saying "it's just ok" for a restaurant because the owner can sue Google for defamation so Google just removes your review[0].
"Politicians send SWAT teams to the homes of people, famously in the case of Andy Grote, where someone replied "you're such a dick" to one of Grote's tweets. Grote reported this to the police, the attorney general figured out who the poster was, and sent a SWAT team (6 police officers!) to confiscate all their electronic devices. This is not an isolated case; this happens frequently."
Nah mate, Germans are famously thin skinned and have built an authoritarian state to protect their feelings.
The answer to big platforms enshittifying is not to move to smaller versions of the same thing. This didn't work for GitHub -> Codeberg/Sourcehut, it didn't work for Twitter -> Mastodon. Because the problem is not necessarily the size, it's the power. Codeberg is exerting power beyond what it should and users have little recourse and get caught up in the issues, some Mastodon servers are fine but there have been plenty of admins who had the power go to their heads or had fallings out with other parts of the network, and again it's the users who get caught up in it.
The answer is building systems that prevent that power trip from ever happening. This is why Bluesky is a better answer to Twitter than Mastodon – the company has its faults, but the approach is a fundamental step forward that Mastodon did not take. The same thing is true of things like Tangled for a software forge. It's no surprise that both of these are based on ATProto, although I'm not saying ATProto is the only option here.
> it didn't work for Twitter -> Mastodon
you mean Twitter -> Bluesky?
Mastodon seems to work as intended
No this is my point, Mastodon doesn't solve this problem in the general case. The shift to Mastodon did not solve the problem of social network admins with too much power, because of the lock-in to instances. Most instances are fine, but there have been many that have caused their users a lot of difficulty, and users fundamentally don't own their data.
The way most users use Bluesky is no different, but the protocol is different, and it is possible to not fall afoul of these issues – data is portable, you can choose your moderation, UI, algorithms, etc, all separately rather than being forced to take a whole package and lose control.
See Blacksky for a completely separate stack, governed separately, that is still fully compatible. That's not possible with Mastodon or even ActivityPub.
How does Bluesky or ATProto prevent that power trip?
I'm not going to do the protocol justice in an HN comment, but a core goal is to separate the entities that control the data, the entities that run the network, and the entities that control the interfaces (and recommendation algos etc).
If your Mastodon admin goes rogue, you a) have to get your data out of their hands, and b) have to rebuild your Mastodon presence in a new location, all your connections, history, etc are gone. That's exactly the same problem that Twitter users faced.
On ATProto, you can self-host your data while still making use of Bluesky/etc, in a way that you can't do with Mastodon or even email. You can choose who your UI comes from and just switch UI and keep everything, you can switch who your moderators are and keep everything else, etc.
Check out Blacksky, they're doing amazing work running a whole separate ATProto system that is fully compatible with, and actually the same social network as Bluesky. You can transparently migrate, at a protocol level, something Mastodon/ActivityPub doesn't attempt to tackle.
But if you are going to self-host, then you can also self-host a Mastodon server and never have to migrate anywhere; wouldn't that achieve the same effect?
Making decisions based on distinguishing A from B is a legit thing to do. Complaining that it's "telling what's right and wrong" is a strawman argument IMO. It's about choices: they made a choice and many users are/will be joufully making the compatible choice.
> Codeberg banning projects that are predominantly LLM-driven.
I can only imagine the backlash if GitHub adopted the same policy.
btw it was clear that this would come, and it was just a matter of time, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087405
"People used GitHub's free infrastructure for over a decade without complaining. Now AI-generated spam and massive amounts of low-quality code are increasing costs everywhere, and suddenly GitHub is the bad guy for acting like a business. Criticizing centralization is fair, but pretending GitHub gave nothing to open source is just dishonest. Alternatives today, are probably going to be flooded by the low-quality AI generated code tomorrow..."
> the one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part
Being from Germany I wondered from day-one how the project's "freedom"-promise ("We celebrate free culture, openness") would eventually work out, because lets face it, Germany is not a free-spech crazed country, even less so are its tech-people and especially not the culture in Berlin.
So the idea of a Berlin-based e.V. full of German sysadmins voting on said "freedom" made this LLM-crypto-kerfuffle exactly as surprising as raw milk spoiling fast in sunshine.
I'm still undecided if I want to self host either gitea or forgejo. Can someone who used both or is particularly experienced with one of them tell me which project to settle with?
Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.
To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?
I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?
If your goal is to just store your repos, even Gogs will do. I self-host Forgejo on sqlite and it‘s been great thusfar. I do not yet use runners, so can‘t say much about that. The Docker registry they offer is a bit awkward to use but better than nothing. My instance is only intranet visible, so I only push to http:// remotes. I have my repos docker volume backed up automatically, so I feel like I got a pretty solid setup right now.
I'm not sure either, the forgejo/gitea fork seems to also involve a lot of activism and interpersonal drama. And codeberg shares a lot of the people involved in that drama on the forgejo side. The gitea/opencollective side has it's own share of "difficult" people.
So I know of no technical reason why any should be better. And the potential for drama and conflict inherent in the developers of both projects make me wary. In the end I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.
(Disclaimer: I use Gitea daily for work and Codeberg daily for personal stuff. I prefer Codeberg)
Gitea is developed by a for-profit organisation while Forgejo is developed by a non-profit.
Ability for rug pull is much greater for gitea imo. Gitea (organisation) already develops non-foss software to sit on top of Gitea (software). Gitea requires copyright attributions for contributions so is more able to change the Gitea license to something non-free in the future.
Codeberg can make up whatever rules they want for their Forgjo instance but you can do what you like on your self-hosted instance so I dont think that the governance of codeberg should concerning for self-hosting.
If Forgejo somehow enshittified, I would expect a popular fork immediately. If Gitea enshittified, I expect most people who would have forked already went to forgejo
Hahahah nothing changed on the cryptoside.
Its still crazy how much energy bitcoin wastes, how much energy bitcoin steals.
Ironic enough, if you know wwere a bitcoin millionar is, its a lot easier to steal from them too.
I agree 100% with Codeberg.
> the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken
Yes, and?
I don't want you wearing football shirts in my pub. People wearing football shirts tend to cause trouble because someone who likes a different colour sees the shirt and kicks off. Leave it outside my pub.
People need to understand that there's a difference between "You're not allowed to do that" and "You're not allowed to do that *here*, because this is my house and my rules".
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.
> 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.
Or the opposite, as the rules are you cannot use AI, all the attribution will be removed, but sure enough there still will be a bunch of AI written code there, people will just have an incentive to mask it instead. So it ends up being a place where AI/human code will be even harder to see the difference between, compared to GitHub, where people apparently have no shame in just attaching claude's username to their commits.
Why would you mask AI code and place it on Codeberg instead of some other place where it won't be deleted on sight? The only reason you would do that is to attack Codeberg.
Why do people use FOSS in their own projects without any sort of credit or attribution to those projects? Why do people copy code, remove who made it and say they wrote it? People do a lot of shitty stuff, hasn't stopped them before.
I mostly stay away from community-lead stuff (and services in particular) mostly because of this.
It’s a never ending drama, and every quarter there’s something new to hate on or get offended by.
I’m tired, boss.
As opposed to business-lead stuff where their credit card company, VC or possible future owner says that you are an undesirable customer and need to get bent?
>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.
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
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...
Yes that's correct. They don't want you, they say good riddance. They want to support free software.
Interesting. Every time Codeberg was mentioned on here it was perfectly clear they only host public open source projects.
Why would you even assume they allow private repos?
Yep, cause all of the LLM hatred is a proxy for end-stage capitalism and a technofeudalist overlay across sympathetic governments.
And yeah, fighting against the worst that capitalism has to offer is a laudable fight. But LLMs, especially Chinese open weights ones offer powerful tools we can use in our fight, as aligned interests of socialists, communists, and anarchists.
Codeberg people who were permitted to vote (700 out of 70000 repo maintainers) instead decided to fight the proxy (llm) and not the actual horrible (capitalists). And of course, that battle is neatly impossible to even define externally. Its a game of purity whack-a-mole with Codeberg admins playing the SCOTUS obscenity game of "I'll know it when I see it".
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TLDR; ~1900 words about how they wish Codeberg spent their time and money supporting crypto projects and how they were owed a warning as a free user that anybody was even considering thinking about rules about how they spend time and money on supporting crypto projects
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> It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned
This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0]
> 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 only ambiguous part is what "mostly" means in practice, but otherwise the Terms of Use is pretty clear. I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive and tries to clarify things but it's all just one very unnecessary drama [2].
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
[2] The proposal for this change was called "ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions" so you can tell that some people are very opinionated on this.
> I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive
Amongst other unwanted activities, their blog post mentions "Projects written and maintained with heavy use of LLMs". If you often chat with LLM, or ask the agent to review your changes, it's writing and maintaining the project with heavy use of LLMs too.
IMHO, this is even more restrictive and ambiguous than "projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools".
And what if a project is hand-written, but the tests are LLM-generated and then refactored by a human? Well, tests are part of a project, so it's bad too.
Also, while reading their blog post, I couldn't shake the feeling that they disdain niche single-person projects. Apparently they never intended to be a "dumping ground", as many people from their community now claim. But it's insulting to assume that when you share your small single-person project, you just "dump" something, as if it is some kind of trash by definition.
So you checked up on everyone critical of this decision in these comments, dug into their git history and confirmed that assumption?
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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.
> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same.
Apples to Oranges here. Linus has himself and the entirety of the Linux Foundation maintainers + outside contributors to effectively review and gatekeep llm slop from making into ONE codebase.
Codeberg has presumably way less people working for it than the Linux Foundation, and has to monitor an avalanche of codebases for slop. Of course they aren't going to be able to pull off what Linux can do.
This is stupid and completely out of touch. No other way to put it. We started a local hackerspace and most of our projects heavily use AI assistants, now we'l be publishing elsewhere.
I hope Tangle doesn't get tangled up in these backward ideas.
I'm guessing the
>sh.tcoin
in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though
Codeberg is also not being considered anymore since they are censoring legitimate projects, crazy honestly, people would have thought that they would be neutral but it's the opposite of neutral, it's way worse than Corporations.
Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.
This is a pretty great strawman of what their actual terms of service and blog post says. You might want to read both quite thoroughly.
It isn't, I'm literally not allowed to host a project on it, knowing obviously it's 100% "LLM-made" nowadays, no modern softwares can be hosted on it, Bun can't be hosted on it (100% "AI" now), you don't find it ridiculous? The world is changing, they don't want to acknowledge it.
The cryptocurrency related projects ban is also insane knowing how much it has contributed to having greater crypto librairies, including all the newer zK stuff.
The entire planet is migrating towards AI coding, and Codeberg is going the opposite way, it's a sure way to die, let's speak about it in 2028 where I'm ready to bet that less than 0.1% of all software dev will be manually editing files.
To me, it seems that they can't manage their infrastructure properly cost wise and decide instead to punish the users for it.
People who derisively call AIs LLMs (not people who are referring to the specific type of system) because they aren't really intelligence or whatever--and thereby sort of ignoring that "artificial" is there--are they aware that some of the AI models we use, e.g., diffusers, are not "LLMs?"
Software should never be about politics, hence I never joined Codeberg, and I'm glad I didn't. But I have to say there's some pretty cool stuff there.