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.
it would be better to encourage people not to have agents create repositories. i think that is the actual issue they want to tackle, while people manually making projects and then having AI write code should obviously be allowed at this point. it will only evolve more, and people can trivially hide it by instructing the LLM and doing manual commits :/
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.
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 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.
>> I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
Can you post some links to examples of such companies? It sounds really bad but I don't want to really believe it until I can see it with mine own eyes.
Definitely agree, though not sure I agree on the why (I’ve also disagreed with the conclusions of similar studies as well).
Programming is high-function job that requires knowledge in a million areas. I know I certainly can’t keep all of them in my head and frequently had to go back to documentation, or look up parameters, or how to implement that one pattern I used that one time that worked well in this situation or… The conclusion they draw is basically that “programming also made me dumber” because I didn’t remember them after working on a completely different project in a different language. I wholeheartedly agree thinking skills can atrophy with AI, but my view is that they are likely replaced by different thinking skills in other areas (e.g. improved prompting, improved structure, understanding harnesses, and so on. I used to write batch scripts often; I stopped, now I suck at it. If I paid someone else to write a batch script, I won’t suddenly remember everything I’ve forgotten but plenty people condemn AI for the equivalent result of paying someone else to do the programming.
> Much like how you can get very cheap mass-manufactured furniture, but some people still build their own tables and chairs.
That’s a pretty good analogy I may have to borrow :) You can also get high quality mass produced furniture but there’s still a group that will always prefer to build their own and set their own standards.
> The analogy doesn't work so well for software because it's freely replicable
The acquisition cost is not relevant. Many people who can afford furniture still make their own. Many people who get free furniture break it down and make something else with it.
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 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.
I struggle with that argument.
I feel the same way but remind myself that I find art stupid (the blue line on a blank canvas worth x millions because of who made it and what their story is or something) and this seems like the same thing. I shouldn't care who wrote something if it's of the same quality. Also part of hacker ethos: we judge people based on their hacking, not diplomas or skin color or other aspects (in this case: type of neural network)
There's lots of people that appreciate art so I'm not saying this isn't a valid argument for wanting code from a real craftsperson. Just to me personally it feels like it shouldn't be, yet I feel similarly about it
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 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.
>> 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.
It would be nice to have concrete examples of that kind of project.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
FWIW I just gave up and went back to GitHub. Not because I like it. I hate the organization.
But having been burned with the year long diversion through Codeberg, and actually caring about getting eyes and contributions on my project, I have no appetite for playing more games here and ending up back in the same situation in another year.
I could self-host, and I'm willing to front that cost. But it would be frankly at the cost of getting eyeballs and contributions. And come with hassle to boot.
I already had a read only mirror to GH from codeberg anyways.
you say human code is better but in reality it is not. a lot of human code is garbage. i am sure if youd look at mine you would be horrified. moritified. a lot of people just have fun with it.
what you imply is only wanting 'professional' projects on there written by professional programmers. This seems like some exclusive membership would be more adequate. no need for fees, just invite the people whos code you like to see -_-
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.
The problem with politically radical communities is that sooner or later you'll find yourself on the other side. "I didn't speak out because I wasn't X" and all that. I never liked codeberg because I saw the writing on the wall. GitHub is flawed, but it is at least more tolerant of dissenting values. You can both host anti AI and pro AI content side by side; imagine that!
> 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
I didn't join the chat so I don't know that. It's final now anyway, nobody can change the text (next year you can propose another vote). No idea what the point would be of ephemeral conversations about it
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).
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
> 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]
> they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas
For one, they've already done this to an extent. For two, they're also doing this by deciding what projects are and are not welcome on their service in the first place.
If 9 people eat an apple or two a day but a tenth person wants to eat 100 apples a day, we don't have to set some apple limit. We can tell the tenth person to pound sand and keep giving everyone else the apples they want.
Having a hard quota means each spammer will fill up the quota, then get some error they don't know how to fix and stop. This means the quota has to be low.
Just saying "no spam" means you don't have to waste a single byte on spam and everyone else can have a higher quota.
>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 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.
I've banned this account. You can't attack other users like that on HN.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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.
Fair point, but I mean perhaps it's not fair for them to have to impose usage limits (which would limit everybody) when they could just make a decision to avoid certain types of projects (which they feel strongly about.)
Simple: Provide the same freedoms to everybody. Do not get involved unless absolutely required to by law. That entails not restricting access for specific projects, and not revoking freedoms for any reason. Everybody should get the same treatment.
For example, in the case of being overloaded by AI contributions, a neutral solution would be to implement the same rate-limiting for every project. Set a sensible limit, and enforce it universally. Do not discriminate specific projects.
Why should GNOME and Forgejo, which are great projects, have to suffer the same limitations as a blob of non-working output from a Markov chain?
It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
Most vibe projects aren't even projects in the way that spam isn't even mail. The message says it's from my bank but it isn't. Why should I have the same limits on messages that say they're from my bank and messages that are actually from my bank?
Yes, human rights should apply to anybody, including war criminals. That is what makes them HUMAN rights.
Universal freedoms and neutrality should apply universally, including to waste-of-time-and-resources AI slop. That is what makes them UNIVERSAL and NEUTRAL.
> It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
I said a REASONABLE limit should be applied. 1 message is not reasonable and you know yourself that this is a bad faith argument if you are honest.
1k messages on the other hand would be a reasonable limit. There is pretty much no legitimate use case for sending more than that to any specific address from any specific destination in a single day.
It is also bad faith because Gmail never claimed to be free or neutral.
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.
It's wild to me that nobody is considering enforcement. Part of the reason this is a bad rule is because there's no way to actually validate what is an LLM coded project. And the AI train is not nearly at its destination. Things are going to change dramatically over the next four years. My prediction? This is not going to age well.
It'll be the same as literally every other ToS ever: if they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're blatantly violating the terms, they kick you off. If they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're subtly violating the terms, they lock out whatever is causing the problem and get in contact with you.
You're trying to sidestep how enforceable something is, and instead implicitly admit that enforcement will be inconsistent. That's my issue. Not all ToS are this way, and they're better for it.
On the contrary? Selective enforcement is tyranny. I'm sure the projects that they disagree with politically are far more likely to be "AI generated" than the projects that they agree with politically.
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.
It's a community code forge. If someone poured their heart and soul into making an awesome game with kick-ass image and sound assets, the community probably wants to support it.
Their stance is obvious: if you just want dumb git hosting with a freemium model, use something else.
If a carpenter uses a table saw, is he still a carpenter?
What if he just throws wood randomly at the table saw and tries to sell whatever pieces come out?
(Never do this with a table saw, btw. They can, and will if you don't use proper procedures, throw wood sideways at speeds that can punch through walls and impale people)
This analogy doesn't make much sense to me. Is the table saw analogous to LLMs because they both work with the appropriate substrate (wood/text)? I don't see how an LLM is like a table saw at all.
Is a musician less of a musician if they use a pre-recorded back-beat and sing on top? Are you not a musician if you use the chord mode on a keyboard?
Is code not hand-written if my editor automatically closes all of my html? What if my editor flags all of the errors and I manually correct them? And what if it auto-corrects at the press of a button?
There is a line and I'm asking about it earnestly, but the table saw analogy doesn't reach it IMO.
What if I barely know the rules of chess and I use a chess computer to play all my games for me; I win the world title this way. Am I a chess Grant Master?
People downvote this kind of take because you're striking at the heart of the enforcement problem and also the definition of what a project that is majority built with AI really means. What they really want is to ascertain the amount of effort from a human that went into the project and they're using the percentage of code generated by an AI as a proxy metric. But it's a bad proxy, both because it doesn't capture human effort and because it is not measurable.
Even human effort is a terrible proxy because effort is a gradient that depends on skill. An expert exerts low effort for the same result a novice would labor over.
I recall having this same exact discussion with my philosophy professor years ago. We all know there is something different about a hand cooked meal and say putting a tablet in a box and a fully cooked meal comes out for you.
I feel like it may be closer to attention? That's the thing we actually value, that someone took the time and put in the effort to do something. And the quality depends on how much we value that attention. Like high effort low quality is praised when it's the work product of your child for instance.
What conversation are you trying to have? I don't even use Codeberg; I've spent years thinking about how the idea behind rules manifests when those rules are actually put in place and enforced. I think a lot about second and third order effects. That's my interest here: an org decided to put these particular rules in place, and based on my experience, I don't think it's going to age well.
But I guess you're right, as far as you go: none of this is my problem. I'm just a curious observer.
No, I need to apologise, I kinda got confused in the threads. That is, I thought this was downstream from another comment I made on the topic, where my point was basically: you (not the literal you who is interested in this on a different level) know if you used LLM. So if you have to ask, the answer is probably no, and if you're genuinely unsure, you can ask them.
I did you wrong, and in general we shouldn't guess the motivations of others, but I'll still say that lot of the comments asking what is the exact meaning of that rule is, how it will get enforced precisely, strike me as seeking to undermine the validity of their decision rather than wanting to make sure they don't run afoul of it. Or even coming up with ideas to help them enforce that rule better. One even said maybe we should test if they actually can tell. I responded to you as if responding to that, and that was uncalled for.
Take the HN guidelines, for example. It's impossible to make them completely "clean cut" rules. But people know that if they genuinely think there's been a misunderstanding they want to clear up, they can contact HN. And with Codeberg it's probably like that, too. Not like Google, where the rules ideally should be 100% clear and mathematically accurate, because you just get nuked by algorithms with no recourse.
You might even say if people post on HN, they already understand what fuzzy rules are, by definition. They know language is fuzzy and that the letter of the law points at the spirit of the law. If someone doesn't want to understand that spirit, no amount of legalese detail will make them understand it. But of course that shouldn't be an argument to shut down discussion about it, either, and I didn't mean it like that.
Thanks for the reply! There's an interesting topic here with respect to fuzzy rules. I definitely like them sometimes because they can capture values and allow for human judgment (which is more costly, but usually better than hard-and-fast rules). I think works well on HN because dang and tomhow tirelessly patrol and enforce, and they both have superb judgment - they aren't just randos that got to moderate the subreddit, they are quite literally the backbone of what I think is the best social site that's ever existed. Lots of human effort there.
Codeberg is different. It's a non-profit, so my criticism is mostly around all the heat and light that will be generated when they start banning projects (politically), and the amount of human effort that it will take to assess whether a project is "majority" written by AI. I just think the way the rule is written is fraught with issues that will cause a lot of wasted effort in the coming months and years.
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.
I really meant -- are these maintainers passionate about the design and maintenance of their tools, are they trying to slop up a demo fast enough that some VC buys them out, is this project a goal in itself or the means to some other end, etc...
Open source software that exists for its own sake is exceedingly rare, and understanding the goals of a community before becoming dependent on it is a good idea
OK! This makes sense, and I agree. But I don't think banning LLM usage gets us there. LLMs are going to be used for coding, whether anyone likes it or not. I think focusing on the effort and care that is put into the codebase is a good metric: LLM generated code that is reviewed by teams of professionals, for example, is a huge win, and should be encouraged.
I readily concede that there is a huge volume of inexperienced programmers generating crap, though.
If you made this statement and you catch a serial killer using your software, it affects the options. A more reasonable example may be: Microsoft may not reverse engineer this. They still can do it privately - you can't enforde it - but if you catch them, then you have more options besides saying "welp, I said they could"
Apparently some people have compared it to some other unlikable groups of people (I know this because a vibecoder complained about the comparison someone else made)
If someone has to ask whether their software is mostly AI-written, then it is.
If someone has to ask exactly how racist you have to be before you can be called a nazi, they're probably a nazi.
If someone has to ask how attracted to underage girls they can be before they're a pedophile, they're a pedophile.
If someone has to ask how responsible you have to be for a death before it's a murder, they're probably a murderer.
Because people who aren't these things clearly know that they aren't.
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.
In this corresponding blog post, one point made is that LLMs tend to LARP big-project infrastructure on small projects. They use the resources for something like GNOME but they aren't actually GNOME so they don't have any excuse for it.
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
Do we have a tool that can detect whether a project is majority LLM-written? This is an unenforceable rule, unless it's just coming down to vibes and they're going to decide what projects to ban based on their feelings.
Are you sure? It's pretty easy to find telltale signs of LLM usage, like the CLAUDE.md file, the '.cursor' directory, the 'vim'-sized codebase done in a week.
That's just vibes. Measuring how much data someone uses is concrete and empirical. They are implementing TOS rules that are based on judgement and require a judge. Very different when implemented practically, especially in terms of effort on the part of the org. Quotas are automated, evicting projects is highly manual.
They are not. You can probably draft some query to get candidates based on those criteria. And so very quickly.
> Quotas are automated, evicting projects is highly manual.
The human world is very chaotic. Automation is not a panacea, which is highlighted by Big Tech abysmal support. Sometimes, you want humans to judge, because the optimal result is based on heuristics and not rules written in stone.
Non-profits like Codeberg are resource-constrained. Apple is delaying app reviews and degrading the reviews that are done because of a slew of AI-generated app. Codeberg is basically adding a "human must review things" step to solve the "we have too much traffic" problem. As a bonus, they are instituting a process that's not only costly, but is vulnerable to being co-opted to ban projects that are not desired for any reason. It's just a naive policy mistake. Time will tell. Let's revisit in 2 years.
Codeberg is a registered non-profit charity whose purpose is to provide free services for free software projects. You can make a different site that works the way you want it to.
Yeah, the natural solution here is to only offer some amount of hosting for free and then charge for larger amounts of code to host. Those quotas are something that is empirical and observable and can be managed. But instead, they're implementing a rule that is unenforceable because you can't actually validate whether or not the majority of the project was written by an LLM. They just chose a suboptimal path and pissed a bunch of people off in the process, and their terms of service makes this out like some kind of copyright or security issue. It's just silly.
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.
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.
Did you... read my post? The first thing I posted in this thread was a direct quote from the Satzung. Did you think "education" was about learning the history of the Ottoman Empire..?
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.
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.
> 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]
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. :)
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]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. 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?
> 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".
> ...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?
> ...and "most ToSes are unenforceable"...
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?
Ironically they currently show a huge banner that LLM-generated content is restricted and crypto is no longer allowed.
No one is reading the ToS you know that very well. That you point out basic advice about ToS is satirical.
If a service like this has some surprising limitations for a potential user, it should be clear up front and not hidden in the ToS. Considering my first paragraph, they know that too.
Someone who has no interest in reading ~two pages of a document written at a middle school reading level in order to find out what their hosts do and don't want to host also has no interest in reading popups, "toasts", and other such notifications on the topic. People who don't want to read aren't going to read.
What I'd suggest to you is that you go out and get head scritches and/or snuggles from a cutie. Not only will this provide you with a fun and positive social interaction, it'll give you the energy required to complain about things that you actually care about, and maybe even make some progress towards fixing them.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
The fun thing about communities is they can allow or disallow whoever they want, and if you don't like their decisions you can find a community more closely aligned with you.
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.
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 do not believe they will kick off a serious project that only uses hundreds of kilobytes just because it isn't big yet. I believe they are saying they don't want things like dotfiles repos (unless many people are using your dotfiles) or one-off scripts. The rules are not for interpretation by a computer program - they are a BDFL trying to communicate what he likes and doesn't like.
Funnily enough, my dotfiles were actually one of the things I was storing on Codeberg! Still, it's Codeberg's platform and it's their choice, but I absolutely will not host my repos on a platform whose BDFL can wake up and decide they're not welcome. At least I can sleep mostly peacefully hosting these things on my own forge.
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.
My current understanding is it's fine if you are trying to build something serious but it isn't there yet. They don't want to host your internal tools, one-off scripts or dotfiles that aren't useful to anyone but you.
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.
Mastodon loves to tout its technical decentralization but it's one of the most politically and culturally monolithic (and intolerant) spaces I've ever seen.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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?
I would fear it’s too little too late. If the concern was the frequency and utilization of resources from agents coding that would have been the instant and fair fix. As it stand it’s a statement about AI usage which is fine but I think the better alternative would be to start a new nonprofit service that was unbiased.
> 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.
Yeah, it's pretty clear that they're instituting rules that they haven't thought about deeply, and they just need to reduce traffic by any means necessary, and they'll use any excuse they can to minimize traffic, whether that's banning LLM code because it could be malicious and has unclear copyright status, or any other reason that they can come up with. The fact that their terms of use don't match up with their blog post about it demonstrates this pretty clearly.
But I don't have a horse in this race. I self-host my code using Fossil.
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.
One helpful way to think about is to what extent your principles are rooted in emotions or rigidity, or whether your principles are rooted more in realism and practicality.
Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
> Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
> why are the second kinds of things here not "criteria" or "heuristics"?
I think you're asking why I call the heuristics for navigating the world "principles"?
Principles come in 3 distinct flavors:
a) Rule of conduct. The standard you hold yourself to regardless of circumstance or convenience. Examples can be honesty, fairness, loyalty, or non-violence.
b) Organizing idea in a field. General concept that explains or governs range of specific cases. They're not moral rules, they're explanatory or decision-making frameworks.
c) Foundational truth or law. Basic proposition that underlies a system of thought. E.g. conservation of energy is principle that isn't proven within the system but a foundation the rest of the system is built on. Axioms play the same role in logic or mathematics.
In this thread, I'm using principles in the (b) sense, whereas I think the author of the article and some of the sentiment in the discussion anchor on the (a) sense.
In practice, one has to find a balance you can live with between (a) and (b), since they can be in tension.
Hm OK, thanks for the lesson here. To be clear, it kinda seems like in your original comment you are using both the (a) and (b) senses, but just making a prescriptive point about (b), right?
I think in this schema, I am still saying a good (b) principle for anyone is probably something like "have knowledge of the (a)s of things and people you depend on, so you can know if any of your other (b)s might cause some conflict down the line".
> 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.
No. LLMs and blockchain are the same kind of shit.
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.
the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.
you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
Supposing you know someone's motivation as if you have access to their psyche is a very unproductive way to participate in a discussion.
The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.
Yet those same Linux geeks have now decided not to take a "stand" against AI, but rather embrace it. Twenty years ago when the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars raged on, did they oppose working with the military contractors at Red Hat or the NSA? No, they focused on the mission.
RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.
The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.
Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.
Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.
But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.
The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.
The point is that he did not even try to link his view about sex and age of consent into anything to do with open source.
I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).
He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.
The politicians and other people with power to make things worse are those who correspond to Hitler in your analogy. Stallman is more like a random ex-Nazi (he no longer holds those views) so like a huge chunk of the postwar German population.
No, I mean that voicing opinions in specialist spaces is rarely seen as bothersome when they uphold the status quo, but the minute they don't they're "making it political"
There's nothing to prove when you posit your responsibility is limitless.
Codeberg is in Germany yet I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine, which they helped finance by building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas. I guess by ops logic that means codeberg is in favor of Russian aggression.
Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this.
Yet,
> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine
that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.
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?
Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.
> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".
I get tired of it because it just becomes a tit for tat war and you end up with these extremely polarized communities.
Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on, but it would be nice if open source communities were a bit more open. There will always be a line to draw but some of the current rules feel arbitrary.
> Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on
To be fair, that seems like a bit of an odd detail to obsess over.
A service could be bright pink for all I care* as long as it just works without me having to worry about checking their blog for the latest decrees being handed down on a daily basis.
* Take that with a grain of salt because my - in some people's eyes - questionable stylistic choices are the direct cause of a couple hundred userstyles and scripts out there.
How is that fair or odd? I don’t want to pop up anime furry girls while I am using a service? Not sure why you think or suggest I am obsessed with it just a choice. Odd comment to make.
It’s a choice to not use it but also a choice the folks that decide to keep it shown.
It is absolutely that communities choice but I see it as a tell for how the folks think about running their community and as these new rules are being made aligns with the assumptions I already made.
Similar to how I migrated from post hog when then created that fabulously confusing OS UI. Or I wouldn’t use a service that used Pepe memes.
The whole Fedora infrastructure shows the default cute Anubis character (while protecting said infrastructure from AI scrappers) & I don't see any problems with that. :)
Is there a bypass for those yet? Not all of the machines I have run it at a reasonable pace, so I'd like to just farm the challenge to some other machine.
My nice desktop that I use for C++/Rust/Formal Verification takes multiple minutes sometimes, and I'd rather not replace the motherboard over this, or figure out why it's not using the GPU/whatever.
OTOH, I have a MacBook with Apple's terrible window manager. It blows through it in a few seconds. The same is true of my ancient phone, and some newer low-power mini-pc's, etc.
I don’t object to anime or furry art. I just think shared infrastructure serving a broad technical audience is better off staying visually neutral. Once branding starts signaling subcultures, the discussion too often shifts from the software to identity. Given the other decisions some of these communities have made it makes sense. Not for me but that’s ok!
I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.
No one's guaranteed to third-party hosting or communities. The software is there. Host it.
If no third-party or community wants to take you in, then I suppose you're going to have to start one for like-minded people. If there aren't any, then I suppose you've lost the marketplace of ideas.
I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.
we're rapidly movement towards an internet where it will be the bad actors hiding their "personal baggage", who will end up in a little corner. as it should be. it's those people who have harmed the world at a global scale. by asking to separate technology from personal & societal values
So, I guess Codeberg doesn't meet the free software bar any more. The FSF defines four freedoms, and they are all pretty clearly being violated by the no LLM policy. They're blocking people based on how they use codeberg (freedom 0), preventing less experienced users from improving / modifying code (freedom 1), based on an argument that you can modify software, but only how they tell you to, and certainly not with an LLM (freedom 2), and of course they are blocking a distribution channel based on these criteria (freedom 3).
In summary: A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
I guess no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, but they've intentionally and significantly lowered the bar with these decisions. I'm happy they did this before I bothered to migrate. Does anyone know of a good alternative to Forgejo? I was thinking of self hosting, but now I just want nothing to do with this organization.
Codeberg is a service, not software. If we applied this standard then Codeberg would already have been in violation of the 4 Freedoms because they forbid distribution of CSAM (I would hope).
Forgejo is unaffected by this because it's the software not the service and is not subject to the service's terms of service. You're misunderstanding the scope of this policy change.
I tried to address this when I pointed out no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, and the FSF also addressed it with the word "adequately".
The policy change means that some free software projects are no longer welcome on codeberg, specifically because those projects take a stronger stance towards protecting free software than codeberg.
What am I misunderstanding? Why should I trust them as stewards of forgejo?
Why shouldn't you? Linus won't let me post erotic Sonic fanfiction to the mailing list, but I still trust Linux to be a safe platform to write erotic Sonic fanfiction.
Forgejo was forked from gitea when the later introduced some controversial business strategies. Gitea was forked from Gogs because gogs did not accept outside contributions.
I am not well informed on this Codeberg story, but could this simply be a way for them to avoid some of the destructive loads that GitHub has been experiencing since "vibe coding" became a thing? Maybe the code origin purity test is just a way to explain it?
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
(1) Cache the non logged-in pages. You can even host static pages in an unmetered way. They maintain their web service software. They should just do that. If an account is knocking over infra by scraping, ban the account. Make it slightly harder to sign up or something, if necessary.
(2) Vibe coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and the grok thing all prefer local copies of a project to scraping web services. Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
(3) If they are worried about AI companies shifting costs (What costs though? See point 1), they should block training scrapers, or - even better - offer a service that resells zero-log-retention / enclaved open-weight LLM inference. This cuts off the revenue stream to the AI companies, and probably lets codeberg skim a bit to expand their own services.
We used to use github at work. It was falling over well before cursor was a thing. Blaming AI for their 1-2 nines of availability is... questionable.
Yes, I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.
The essay "Who Does That Server Really Serve?" from the FSF explains why their definition of software freedom is more relevant for SaaS than it is for proprietary software:
In it Stallman gets dangerously close to admitting it's possible to be worse than Microsoft Windows. After documenting spyware and universal back doors in Windows, the section of the article comparing proprietary software to SaaS concludes:
SaaSS is equivalent to running proprietary software with spyware and a universal back door. It gives the server operator unjust power over the user, and unjust power is something we must resist.
It even has a section towards the end addressing the slippery slopes that github-style services provide:
Use of simple software repositories is not SaaSS because most of the actual work (as distinguished from redistribution) is done in the contributors' computers. However, when the repository starts doing other kinds of computing work for the users, such as running tests, that starts to cross the line. When the users are contributing to the project, so the work is the project's work rather than the contributor's work, that still is not SaaSS for the users. But it may be SaaSS for the project. However, if the testing means running the programs that the project develops, it is not SaaSS because the project does control the crucial software being run.
Yes, but Forgejo is developed by Codeberg, which, according to the FSF essay's criteria, is offering an unethical product that undermines user freedom.
You haven't provided any evidence that Codeberg is trustworthy.
I'm not mad that they have a fork of some FOSS software that they use. I'm upset that they're actively trying to take away other people's freedom under the banner of a non-profit whose mission is to support FOSS software projects.
That's worse than just some random group lying loudly about its intentions. They're getting tax benefits that probably should be yanked unless they change their charter. They also accepted donations to further the existing charter, and they're doing the opposite.
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):
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).
One of them is a website that hosts source code from other users, their "stance" is arguably more important because of that. The other one is just a personal blog, completely different subjects. I created an account just to reply to this.
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.
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.
Yeah, every day brings choices. I tend to allow a first party js from every small site, and that covers Anubis and the even more egregious use case of Mastodon instances. Needing 100KB of Js to display 140 chars :eyeroll:
I still haven't allowed Cloudflare, though. That is bounce or incognito.
I'm increasingly tempted to just archive.is 100% of anubis page loads or something like that, then instruct my LLM to try archive.is if it sees anubis. If there was a plugin for this, it'd probably get close to 100% cache hit rate for agents pretty quickly. The plugin could even have an MCP endpoint that popped up windows for me to solve captchas or whatever in my primary browsing session, then uploaded the result to the shared cache.
Archive.is blocks agents, I think, but you get the idea.
Also, I really wonder what the economics are for your example. The JS boilerplate for the anubis landing page is usually longer than the piece of information I need.
(That's ignoring the actual anubis JS, which is probably on a privacy-destroying shared CDN link).
Well, my lens tends to be geopolitical rather than economic. Privacy isn't some axiomatic metric for me. I just decide if someone is an ally and I am willing to put up with the cost of their action. With Anubis I don't see it being suborned yet by non-allies like big companies. But I'm definitely watching for that.
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 am fine with the "degraded" experience. I eventually gave up because I got served captcha loops instead of the actual site. All I need from an untrusted site is to read text which shouldn't require JavaScript.
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
I was wondering if the hash might be unique, then a commenter would say "it's now `kill.<hash xyz>.js`, and the webmaster would be able to connect <hash XYZ> to a user agent and IP. It wouldn't accomplish anything, but it might be fun.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
That was never much of a problem on the old internet. It's just something corporations made us feel entitled to. You don't use the same memorized password for all your really unimportant accounts and forget about them after you're done?
There's always the email option, too. "Found a bug? Email bugs@example.com." - that's the original decentralised discussion forum.
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
This is not about demanding a community, as the article argues about at great length: it's only a polite way to say that many ‘vibe coders’ are annoying, negative net value assholes. Community would ensure that they are not aberrant lone wolves.
> 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.
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.
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...
We've gotten used to stuff like GitHub just existing, the same way Windows (up to XP) just exists. If you have a Windows XP computer it keeps working indefinitely. Corporations dumping taught us to expect the same with online services that need constant maintenance.
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?
No we can't. Because my opinion is that a government should punish speech in certain cases, e.g. speech that is against the human dignity of other people or speech that is dangerous (e.g. yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre.
We delegate these rules to governments to secure the individuals rights to life, liberty, and happiness (as your declaration of independence so wonderfully puts), not because we want to allow shitheads to allow to shittalk. This is just a side-effect we all have to endure, because we don't want governments to police all speech.
That means also in the US not everything you could say goes unpunished by the government, especially if you're not white, male and christian. Remember, the police is part of the government and if they can shoot you because they thought they have seen a gun, they can also shoot you because of what you said.
On top of that we, collectively, form governments for (among others) the purpose of protecting each others speech, not just from governments, but from each other, from our bosses, coorporations, from the police. That means, we collectively, use the government as a governing body tho whom we delegated certain powers. Where to draw the line is different in different regions of the earth. For example the female nipple printed in many European newspapers would not be protected speech in the US for puritan religious reasons.
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.
Do the other rules bother you the same way? Like the one about racial discrimination? I mean, there's no surefire way to identify racial discrimination.
Racial discrimination can have fringe cases but is at least something you can often clearly see. You can not detect the intention but you can often see the outcome. But yes. Other rules that are unenforceable without reading tea leaves are also a problem.
Not really. I'd rather have decisions that are not made on gut feeling. I'd still rather have a human make the decision but based on facts not feelings.
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.
> 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.
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?).
Not related, but this is an assumption one should automatically reject as soon as it comes to mind.
People do like change, when it is for the better. People have happily moved from SVN to Git, from Vi to Neovim, from Coke to Pepsi (find better examples yourself) etc... People may be emotional about change, but they are not stubborn (generally). Usually they just don't perceive the benefits of the new thing (or they are outweighed by the drawbacks for them). Sometimes "better" has a subjective part that you can't argue about, so you have to "agree to disagree". But it's better to disagree on an opinion than to assume that they don't like change.
There is a legitimate and probably significant set of people who agree with the pro-free software, copyleft, non-commercial etc outlook but don't have the same analysis of AI and LLM-generated tooling. There was nothing in the terms of use prior to this move to indicate those tools were out of bounds or that those opinions were unwelcome. Nor anything about tool use at all.
All those people were just told they're not welcome.
BTW the nuance in the blog post is retroactive and done after the vote was completed. The vote had no such nuance and requests for clarification were refused.
> 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.
> [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’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.
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.
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.
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:
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 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.
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.
The most coherent argument I have heard is that LLM output might not be copyrightable. This matches what most courts have said, and is the assumption the entire industry is working under. There are probably eventually going to be cases where the LLM copies something verbatim, and then the courts will have to come up with some refinement to their tests. The legal exposure for this for codeberg is basically zero in the US, thanks to the DMCA.
So, their "copyright status is unclear" stance seems to be saying "it is unclear if the contributor can copyright the code, or if it cannot be copyrighted", but that argument does not make any sense:
"Not copyrightable" means "no one has a right to enforce a copyright on this".
If that is their objection, they need to run scrubs for public domain works + delete those too. God help them if they want to host old UNIX software. Unless someone has renewed the copyrights on stuff written before 1979, the copyright has already lapse, making it "not copyrightable".
If, alternatively, they're worried about inadvertent plagiarism, then they already have to have mechanisms to deal with intentional plagiarism, so no action is required.
If they're trying to impose their values on users by micromanaging acceptable use of third parties' computers, well, I agree: That's explicitly in violation of the definition of Free and Open Source software, so they're basically just ignoring their non-profit mission statement.
That is a good point. You could not host public domain code there, and there are quite important FOSS projects that are public domain - as well as the the old code you mentioned there is current stuff such as SQLite.
> The legal exposure for this for codeberg is basically zero in the US, thanks to the DMCA.
They are in Germany and they distribute software globally (i.e. you can clone or download code from anywhere) so zero liability in the US is not enough.
I think you are being rather harsh on them, but I think your point is more evidence that the real reasons are the ones in the blog, and they should probably remove copyright as a justification in the ToS.
I don't really understand international copyright laws at this point (too many jurisdictions), but, given the number of global sites that can only exist because of the DMCA (like YouTube), I assume there are comparable carve outs allowing platforms to host user uploaded content without being sued out of existence, as long as they pull copyright violations down reasonably quickly.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
I suspect they already did this a few times and then concluded, "you know what? This whole LLM thing is stupid. Why do we waste our time adjusting their resource limits when we could just remove the whole thing?"
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.
> 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.
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.
It's because a lot of free software people are in Germany. Nothing more, nothing less. This may be related to the policy of teaching everyone fluent English as a second language since elementary school, or to the old school Chaos Computer Club.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
It’s interesting how many revolutions and even small efforts surrounding the concept of freedom very quickly go from “freedom” to “no actually I mean freedom for things I like”.
I feel like that’s a personal topic with you and the idea that someone draws some content and somehow certifies “it’s ok” has plenty of obvious issues unrelated to the topic.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I'll kindly disagree with you here. After you posted this reply, I have received an email, whose subject reads: "AI writes code in seconds, but here's what it's missing".
The mail, coming from Atlassian, is encouraging people to let swarms of agents loose to "develop" something from a simple prompt, and suggesting Jira can act as a context store with all the new features they implemented.
So, people are expected to make "coding with an LLM" their personality or modus operandi, unfortunately.
I agree that the discourse can be gentler, kinder and have a more open stance, yet Mastodon has this 500 character limit which causes statements to go blunt. I experience the same problem while trying to post there.
However, this doesn't invalidate Codeberg's stance. There's a slop problem everywhere, and people want to stop or slow it down. I'm in the same camp with Codeberg, and don't want vibe-coded applications pushed as man-made creations.
Also, to reiterate, Codeberg doesn't hardline the policy. They effectively ban vibe-coded projects, and if that matters, this is why I like them, and why I like some other services I use.
To close, yes, people are irritated by AI powered vibe-coding and respond too harshly, but I can understand them. Maybe we should understand why the "ugly" response exists before shunning them, so we can arrive to a more constructive place.
> 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.
Nope, personally this enters full vibe-coding territory for me, and I won't approach this code with a 30 feet pole isolated in a container running in a VM.
Sorry, but seriously.
If it works (and we constantly see LLMs cheat to pass tests), and helps someone, more power to you and them, but no, this is what vibe-coding squarely is, and what Codeberg explicitly excludes.
I see two big problems with that codebase:
- No human, incl. you can modify this meaningfully.
- The AI wrote it won't be able to touch it again, too.
So it's write-once software, and this is the biggest problem with vibe-coded software.
> 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.
Codeberg is run by a German association, which defines its role in the bylaws to support FOSS (§2 in the bylaws). You can use their software Forgejo to run your own server.
A 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.
When I read the issues thread on Codeberg, it reaffirmed my decision to self-host my Git repositories and mirror them to GitHub, GitLab, and Codeberg. At the time, I chose this approach because Codeberg already had its "no private repos" rule in place. I know they don't ban all private repos, but still, I wonder: Did they have bad experiences with private repos, LLMs, or crypto projects? Or is this a preemptive measure?
However, Github and Others can also ban or delete my stuff anytime. But the feeling is a different.
Because now I'm thinking what's next?
Tolerance is a beautiful thing, but it can also be painful. Perhaps, in general, it's better to make individual decisions rather than relying on sweeping statements.
Banning LLMs and crypto sounds more like a move made by a fearful, angry person and has little to do with openness.
> 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).
Second:
> - Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects.
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.
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.
"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..."
> 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.
Fortunately, Codeberg is not free software. It's a service provider providing a service. They themselves can be as non-neutral and non-free as they like. The software beneath it all remains free.
Seriously, just host your own Forgejo if it's that much of a problem. It's right there.
> You think Stallman and Torvalds did what they did because they were neutral?
Is that a joke? Both have made it abundantly clear that yes, this is their stance. Let me quote literally the FIRST freedom RMS put into writing:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
This is explicitly free and neutral. "for any purpose", no restrictions. Linus endorsed this stance by licensing the kernel under GPLv2, and has repeatedly upheld this view ever since, making the argument again and again that he does not want to restrict what people do with the project.
Even in his famous announcement message, before adopting GPL, Linus said:
> I'm doing a (free) operating system
Then he licensed Linux with his own free license, before adopting GPL.
> Full source must be available (and free)
Freedom is and has always been important to both RMS and Linus.
> If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?
No. In fact it is one of the freedoms guaranteed by free software.
> By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions
There are people making that argument, but there are also people arguing that guaranteeing freedom requires more conditions. There is no real consensus on this question.
The problem with slippery slopes is that you never stop midway.
Banning any form of legal, libre software, shows that you are not floss friendly and I do not want to host my code with organizations like yours. I dropped sourcehut when they banned cryptocurrency software and today I drop you.
Looks like I'm going back to self-hosting and accepting patches via email.
I have seen so much governance weirdness from Codeberg over the years that it isn't even on the radar to migrate to. GitHub has gotten less stable, I wouldn't mind an alternative, but Codeberg just wouldn't ever be that. To be fair I am just on the sidelines seeing net commentary so it may not be a fair take but it doesn't change that point.
Do people know Codeberg well and migrate to it anyways, or they just don't know? If the former, wondering what gets you to that point.
>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.
I have ~100 repos on github and only a few of them with LLM assistance. Aside from a few comments and a PR here and there throughout the years nobody cares about them. I have to assume it's the same for the majority of developers.
I used to think that good governance made good policy, but I now realize that it’s used to justify the people making the policy. So all that really matters is picking the right people to make the policy .
In this case, you seem to have a robust democratic process, with a not for profit board, membership, voting rights and more.
Meanwhile GitHub had a better policy despite having the worst possible governance model from an open source perspective (it was a corporation, and likely mostly top down for most of its meaningful development).
But thankfully GitHub was full of great people for the first 15 years or so.
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.
The "anti LLM" or "no AI" clause is really more a "covering all ass" clause.
If you want to improve Forgejo and have that AI PR; you better clean it up of all traces - resulting in a PR that is likely neat and going to be merged.
I see no issue with that. It simply enforces a pace and process that is very befitting and in my opinion mandatory for such a central system they're maintaining.
> 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.
As long as you don't insult someone or support Palestine it shouldn't be a problem. German speech law is strict, but predictable. Although there was originally no law against supporting Palestine - it was a reinterpretation of the anti-Nazi laws - I believe they've now made it a law.
This prompted me to revisit my own decision to avoid Codeberg by re-reading their Terms of Use[1]. A few things stand out:
- They explicitly require all hosted software to have a FLOSS license
- Private repos are only allowed in support of Public FLOSS repos, with a scary ambiguous note about "really small and personal stuff"
- Projects with heavy use of coding AI are explicitly forbidden
This means I can't use Codeberg for personal projects that aren't intended for public consumption, especially if I used Claude Code to whip them up. Oh well, this is why I self-host Forgejo.
For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:
> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.
> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
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?
Dumb question, but how do they know if a codebase is actually written by an LLM? I know that sometimes code agents write "Co-authored by" in the commit messages, but this is something you can over-write.
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.
> 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.
I don't understand why people still bother with these kind of choices anymore. Why not just write your own service and self-host? I just vibed a git hosting thing and it has been running fine for some months.
I agree with Codeberg, I think they're arguing for some sort of AI Code-Gen Fair Use policy.
My take: If ai generated the code, let ai pay for it, unless it has been proved worth it's upkeep.
Basically, show me some sort of: AI code-gen proof of work (or proof of worth, some mechanism), then you're in.
Automation at ai-scale are very expensive, just look at the trillions of USD being spent by ai companies. And let's not forget, that the rest of us don't have those levels of funding. And neither do non-profits like Codeberg i'm guessing.
And some more, i'm not even considering security issues, where for instance ai code-gen turns on hosting/platform providers (similar to chapgpt incident on hugginfaces). even if the sandbox proves resilient, the code is parasitic in nature or behaves like a virus.
Are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
I understand Codeberg's standpoint. From their point of view I think it is only reasonable to sticking to your guns as well as mentioning, that at the end of the day there is no free lunch and LLM coding may be bloat to them.
I know the European scene since the 80th and know, that all projects are not what the rest of world think they are: free, and an alternative to anything that is US based.
European software devs are activists in the old-school meaning. In the 80th, they were crackers, hackers, and they looked for likeminded people. BTX scandal is only for very old veterans, as well as von Gravenreuth or Highscore.
I was part of the C64, Amiga scene and still have many friends their. Nevertheless we have very different attitudes today.
Without any irony I finally hope that people finally value that is provided by GitHub or other services from the Valley.
Trashing them or thinking, you just needed to host a service outside the US makes it a viable option is naiv.
I respect EU's and European devs' decisions, but I would never ever rely on them. I love the US and happy to be almost 100% not using European services.
Yes it reads "Software development, but free! Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort..." but you didn't know Germans or the fineprint. Codeberg is organized as "eingetragener Verein" and here you have the basis for what is considered free: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....
Folks, this is politics, this is power struggle, this is what Germans call "Grabenkämpfe". If you aren't used to the lifestyle, you won't understand nor enjoy the ride.
I build an extremely successfully eV myself which still lives and thrives for 30 years now - without me.
Value GitHub, stay away from European "alternatives". They aren't.
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.
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
I think their humans are reviewing the repositories that are created. This is probably strange to Americans accustomed to everything being an automated process at a faceless corporation.
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?
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.
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 threw my lot in with Forgejo. After the fork, most of the maintainers went along with it.
In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.
(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
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?
Sorry, but I do not understand. Can I host a repo publicly at least while it is still in initial development stages? For example, I have two repos that have been in development for more than 2 years. I intend to show case them and continue them as open source, but I will probably be the only user for a while. These two predate AI/LLM advancements, and I am pretty anti-AI for non-professional use cases. As someone put it, it is single-user open source repo with low or zero users, and have low commits, and are well below any storage limits.
Yes, unless it's obviously something that is only ever usable by you. If they did remove it for some reason anyway, they would contact you first because it isn't spam.
Sure, i linked the docs about private repos specifically. Public repositories of FLOSS are the mission of codeberg, minus slopware and shitcoins (the subject of this thread). I thought the FAQ was pretty clear about that, but if that's not the case, i guess PRs are welcome to improve it.
> 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.
Jim Goad wrote about this. His target was the Bay Area crowd, but Berlin is the same:
„ Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.
You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.“
> 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".
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.
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.
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?
No it wouldn't, because each Mastodon server can choose who to federate with and many servers don't federate openly or don't federate with smaller hosts for technical, scaling, or even political reasons.
I've done it, self hosted Mastodon limited my ability to participate in the social network in a way that it does not on ATProto.
Also you can't port between instances. Whereas this is fundamental to the ATProto ecosystem.
I don't see why anyone is shocked that people would want to build a community that keeps out vibe coders and crypto bros. There are plenty of options, who cares?
> 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.
> 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".
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".
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
> 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].
> 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.
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 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.
Software has always been political. From the big P political when PGP was banned from export from the US in the 90s, to the small p political where you can fix the software running on your own machine (akin to filling in the potholes on main street).
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?"
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.
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.
1. You are not entitled to a website hosting your content. A website refusing to host you is not censorship in any form whatsoever.
2. I'm pretty positive they did this because of infrastructure reasons as a secondary reason to their mission. LLMs mean people can just pump out projects at light speed, and that costs money to both host and do things with on CI/CD. If you want that potentially to be lifted in the future, pay them so they are able to have that infrastructure.
It has nothing to do with "vibe coding" in the sense you imply, you see the ARC-AGI, DeepSWE benchmarks and so-on, assume that will be 99.9% soon when we have Opus 9 which will be soon, which means in practice that most SWE are beaten by top models, which means that letting humans code will be more dangerous (and inferior) than letting models code, we are already close to that which is why we must change the way we work now, not the moment it comes.
It's already dangerous today to not review codebases by top models, how do you think that will be in 2028?
And yes, a simple combination of top models today in adversarial+loops... and only 20 subscriptions will do much better than Codeberg ($100K monthly token equivalent).
But sure, Codeberg can remain alive for all the legacy stuff, but imo the mentality is quite backward.
This comment is full of both a lot of hyperbole and theoretical outcomes that Idk even where to begin. There for one is no guarantee that Anthropic will remain around long enough for them to get to Opus 9 let alone a better model for one. The same could be said for OAI.
And again, what is the problem with a platform wanting to not be flooded with a bunch of low-quality code that gets abandoned after it's done what the creator wanted it to do? I keep seeing this claim of these models being better than "most" developers but have yet to see any actual statistics cited to back up this claim which makes me think it's all just vibes.
It's not low-quality code, that's the thing, yes, you can do trash, like most humans do, but it can also output better code, consistency... than most humans today, what will it be next year?
Anthropic isn't going away, even if they do, a lot will compete anyway, AI in a general sense will reach the point where our jobs as dev will be to prompt all day long and that's it. It's almost sure that we will keep having better models and tooling, right now every single month it's getting better and better, and on some aspects not just linearly.
the moment GPT-3.5 dropped, it was already not hard to picture literally what we do today, the "hmm what if THIS suddenly is actually accurate", and tomorrow, it will be all the pain points we currently have that are solved.
Genuinely, see the Bun porting? Imagine that is with a very "weak" model, weak tooling, weak hardware, now imagine that tomorrow, it will port it 50x faster, more performant, better consistency, docs, and virtually zero bugs: not hard to picture at all, it's what it will be imo in 1 year, 2 tops just if the current pace continue, that's not even accounting for the thousand of new companies coming, can we really say it's vibe trash when it outperforms humans?
Think of what's slowing you down today and why you aren't already a Bot typing non-stop and imagine those solved, now what?
I must add Kimi K3 as another example, nothing "wahou" with it in the sense that it was already a sure thing, it's so great to see it coming already, but it's also sure we will have Mythos 10 level open-source, open-weight in a few years, it won't be surprising I mean, it's just logical. We will also have Marvel-level movies done with a prompt.
PS: sorry it's all over the place and out of touch with the initial Codeberg thing
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.
it would be better to encourage people not to have agents create repositories. i think that is the actual issue they want to tackle, while people manually making projects and then having AI write code should obviously be allowed at this point. it will only evolve more, and people can trivially hide it by instructing the LLM and doing manual commits :/
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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 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.
>> I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
Can you post some links to examples of such companies? It sounds really bad but I don't want to really believe it until I can see it with mine own eyes.
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.
Definitely agree, though not sure I agree on the why (I’ve also disagreed with the conclusions of similar studies as well).
Programming is high-function job that requires knowledge in a million areas. I know I certainly can’t keep all of them in my head and frequently had to go back to documentation, or look up parameters, or how to implement that one pattern I used that one time that worked well in this situation or… The conclusion they draw is basically that “programming also made me dumber” because I didn’t remember them after working on a completely different project in a different language. I wholeheartedly agree thinking skills can atrophy with AI, but my view is that they are likely replaced by different thinking skills in other areas (e.g. improved prompting, improved structure, understanding harnesses, and so on. I used to write batch scripts often; I stopped, now I suck at it. If I paid someone else to write a batch script, I won’t suddenly remember everything I’ve forgotten but plenty people condemn AI for the equivalent result of paying someone else to do the programming.
Does that mean codeberg has just guaranteed its own demise?
> Does that mean codeberg has just guaranteed its own demise?
In industry, certainly. The free-because-it's-a-hobby crowd will still be well served by Codeberg.
Much like how you can get very cheap mass-manufactured furniture, but some people still build their own tables and chairs.
> Much like how you can get very cheap mass-manufactured furniture, but some people still build their own tables and chairs.
That’s a pretty good analogy I may have to borrow :) You can also get high quality mass produced furniture but there’s still a group that will always prefer to build their own and set their own standards.
The analogy doesn't work so well for software because it's freely replicable
> The analogy doesn't work so well for software because it's freely replicable
The acquisition cost is not relevant. Many people who can afford furniture still make their own. Many people who get free furniture break it down and make something else with it.
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 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.
I struggle with that argument. I feel the same way but remind myself that I find art stupid (the blue line on a blank canvas worth x millions because of who made it and what their story is or something) and this seems like the same thing. I shouldn't care who wrote something if it's of the same quality. Also part of hacker ethos: we judge people based on their hacking, not diplomas or skin color or other aspects (in this case: type of neural network)
There's lots of people that appreciate art so I'm not saying this isn't a valid argument for wanting code from a real craftsperson. Just to me personally it feels like it shouldn't be, yet I feel similarly about it
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.
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>> 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.
It would be nice to have concrete examples of that kind of project.
> 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.
> 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.
FWIW I just gave up and went back to GitHub. Not because I like it. I hate the organization.
But having been burned with the year long diversion through Codeberg, and actually caring about getting eyes and contributions on my project, I have no appetite for playing more games here and ending up back in the same situation in another year.
I could self-host, and I'm willing to front that cost. But it would be frankly at the cost of getting eyeballs and contributions. And come with hassle to boot.
I already had a read only mirror to GH from codeberg anyways.
you say human code is better but in reality it is not. a lot of human code is garbage. i am sure if youd look at mine you would be horrified. moritified. a lot of people just have fun with it.
what you imply is only wanting 'professional' projects on there written by professional programmers. This seems like some exclusive membership would be more adequate. no need for fees, just invite the people whos code you like to see -_-
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.
The problem with politically radical communities is that sooner or later you'll find yourself on the other side. "I didn't speak out because I wasn't X" and all that. I never liked codeberg because I saw the writing on the wall. GitHub is flawed, but it is at least more tolerant of dissenting values. You can both host anti AI and pro AI content side by side; imagine that!
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.
Needs to be a member of parent #codeberg, which is invite only. I wonder if they gated the room after public backlash?
By "public" you mean "people with no repositories on codeberg"?
I didn't join the chat so I don't know that. It's final now anyway, nobody can change the text (next year you can propose another vote). No idea what the point would be of ephemeral conversations about it
Sounds very disingenuous and manipulative in nature. Thanks for letting us know.
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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).
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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
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.
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.
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.
The open source project is Forgejo. You can host is yourself with any policies you want.
Guess the Germans woke up and had a board meeting about this comment lmao
> 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
Ah okay, and no problem!
> 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-...
[1] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/
> they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas
For one, they've already done this to an extent. For two, they're also doing this by deciding what projects are and are not welcome on their service in the first place.
If 9 people eat an apple or two a day but a tenth person wants to eat 100 apples a day, we don't have to set some apple limit. We can tell the tenth person to pound sand and keep giving everyone else the apples they want.
Having a hard quota means each spammer will fill up the quota, then get some error they don't know how to fix and stop. This means the quota has to be low.
Just saying "no spam" means you don't have to waste a single byte on spam and everyone else can have a higher quota.
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>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.
Just because the EFF is tax exmept doesn't mean they have to publish my Sonic the Hedgehog porn on their website
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I've banned this account. You can't attack other users like that on HN.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
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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.”
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
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.
Fair point, but I mean perhaps it's not fair for them to have to impose usage limits (which would limit everybody) when they could just make a decision to avoid certain types of projects (which they feel strongly about.)
What would a neutral free SaaS look like to you?
Simple: Provide the same freedoms to everybody. Do not get involved unless absolutely required to by law. That entails not restricting access for specific projects, and not revoking freedoms for any reason. Everybody should get the same treatment.
For example, in the case of being overloaded by AI contributions, a neutral solution would be to implement the same rate-limiting for every project. Set a sensible limit, and enforce it universally. Do not discriminate specific projects.
Why should GNOME and Forgejo, which are great projects, have to suffer the same limitations as a blob of non-working output from a Markov chain?
It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
Most vibe projects aren't even projects in the way that spam isn't even mail. The message says it's from my bank but it isn't. Why should I have the same limits on messages that say they're from my bank and messages that are actually from my bank?
I do not think you get the point.
Yes, human rights should apply to anybody, including war criminals. That is what makes them HUMAN rights.
Universal freedoms and neutrality should apply universally, including to waste-of-time-and-resources AI slop. That is what makes them UNIVERSAL and NEUTRAL.
> It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
I said a REASONABLE limit should be applied. 1 message is not reasonable and you know yourself that this is a bad faith argument if you are honest.
1k messages on the other hand would be a reasonable limit. There is pretty much no legitimate use case for sending more than that to any specific address from any specific destination in a single day.
It is also bad faith because Gmail never claimed to be free or neutral.
Hosting your code on a free server is not a universal right. It is a privilege.
And I never claimed that it was. Stop attacking that strawman.
My point is: Codeberg is not a neutral and free git forge. I wish that it was.
What they are doing is completely within their legal and moral rights. I just disagree with it.
Did they claim to be neutral and free?
If Google allowed each spammer to send me up to 1k messages per day that wouldn't exactly solve the spam problem, would it?
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.
It's wild to me that nobody is considering enforcement. Part of the reason this is a bad rule is because there's no way to actually validate what is an LLM coded project. And the AI train is not nearly at its destination. Things are going to change dramatically over the next four years. My prediction? This is not going to age well.
It'll be the same as literally every other ToS ever: if they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're blatantly violating the terms, they kick you off. If they detect a problem and trace it to you, and you're subtly violating the terms, they lock out whatever is causing the problem and get in contact with you.
You're trying to sidestep how enforceable something is, and instead implicitly admit that enforcement will be inconsistent. That's my issue. Not all ToS are this way, and they're better for it.
Perfect enforcement is called tyranny. Anything that matters isn't enforced perfectly.
On the contrary? Selective enforcement is tyranny. I'm sure the projects that they disagree with politically are far more likely to be "AI generated" than the projects that they agree with politically.
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.
It's a community code forge. If someone poured their heart and soul into making an awesome game with kick-ass image and sound assets, the community probably wants to support it.
Their stance is obvious: if you just want dumb git hosting with a freemium model, use something else.
The resource limit are quite clear: From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.
And as long as it's hand-made, that's fine.
What is hand made code? Does that mean no auto complete? No linters?
If a carpenter uses a table saw, is he still a carpenter?
What if he just throws wood randomly at the table saw and tries to sell whatever pieces come out?
(Never do this with a table saw, btw. They can, and will if you don't use proper procedures, throw wood sideways at speeds that can punch through walls and impale people)
This analogy doesn't make much sense to me. Is the table saw analogous to LLMs because they both work with the appropriate substrate (wood/text)? I don't see how an LLM is like a table saw at all.
Is a musician less of a musician if they use a pre-recorded back-beat and sing on top? Are you not a musician if you use the chord mode on a keyboard?
Is code not hand-written if my editor automatically closes all of my html? What if my editor flags all of the errors and I manually correct them? And what if it auto-corrects at the press of a button?
There is a line and I'm asking about it earnestly, but the table saw analogy doesn't reach it IMO.
What if I barely know the rules of chess and I use a chess computer to play all my games for me; I win the world title this way. Am I a chess Grant Master?
I think you already know the answers to all of these questions.
This is an excellent analogy that shows how LLMs are fundamentally different than linters, auto-complete, or transpilers.
People downvote this kind of take because you're striking at the heart of the enforcement problem and also the definition of what a project that is majority built with AI really means. What they really want is to ascertain the amount of effort from a human that went into the project and they're using the percentage of code generated by an AI as a proxy metric. But it's a bad proxy, both because it doesn't capture human effort and because it is not measurable.
Even human effort is a terrible proxy because effort is a gradient that depends on skill. An expert exerts low effort for the same result a novice would labor over.
Maybe it shouldn't be viewed as some kind of reward but merely as a spam reduction measure. If you put in effort, it isn't spam.
That's a good point. I think the core metric is somehow quality, but that's notoriously difficult to measure.
I recall having this same exact discussion with my philosophy professor years ago. We all know there is something different about a hand cooked meal and say putting a tablet in a box and a fully cooked meal comes out for you.
I feel like it may be closer to attention? That's the thing we actually value, that someone took the time and put in the effort to do something. And the quality depends on how much we value that attention. Like high effort low quality is praised when it's the work product of your child for instance.
> People downvote this kind of take because you're striking at the heart of the enforcement problem
That's not your problem.
What conversation are you trying to have? I don't even use Codeberg; I've spent years thinking about how the idea behind rules manifests when those rules are actually put in place and enforced. I think a lot about second and third order effects. That's my interest here: an org decided to put these particular rules in place, and based on my experience, I don't think it's going to age well.
But I guess you're right, as far as you go: none of this is my problem. I'm just a curious observer.
No, I need to apologise, I kinda got confused in the threads. That is, I thought this was downstream from another comment I made on the topic, where my point was basically: you (not the literal you who is interested in this on a different level) know if you used LLM. So if you have to ask, the answer is probably no, and if you're genuinely unsure, you can ask them.
I did you wrong, and in general we shouldn't guess the motivations of others, but I'll still say that lot of the comments asking what is the exact meaning of that rule is, how it will get enforced precisely, strike me as seeking to undermine the validity of their decision rather than wanting to make sure they don't run afoul of it. Or even coming up with ideas to help them enforce that rule better. One even said maybe we should test if they actually can tell. I responded to you as if responding to that, and that was uncalled for.
Take the HN guidelines, for example. It's impossible to make them completely "clean cut" rules. But people know that if they genuinely think there's been a misunderstanding they want to clear up, they can contact HN. And with Codeberg it's probably like that, too. Not like Google, where the rules ideally should be 100% clear and mathematically accurate, because you just get nuked by algorithms with no recourse.
You might even say if people post on HN, they already understand what fuzzy rules are, by definition. They know language is fuzzy and that the letter of the law points at the spirit of the law. If someone doesn't want to understand that spirit, no amount of legalese detail will make them understand it. But of course that shouldn't be an argument to shut down discussion about it, either, and I didn't mean it like that.
Thanks for the reply! There's an interesting topic here with respect to fuzzy rules. I definitely like them sometimes because they can capture values and allow for human judgment (which is more costly, but usually better than hard-and-fast rules). I think works well on HN because dang and tomhow tirelessly patrol and enforce, and they both have superb judgment - they aren't just randos that got to moderate the subreddit, they are quite literally the backbone of what I think is the best social site that's ever existed. Lots of human effort there.
Codeberg is different. It's a non-profit, so my criticism is mostly around all the heat and light that will be generated when they start banning projects (politically), and the amount of human effort that it will take to assess whether a project is "majority" written by AI. I just think the way the rule is written is fraught with issues that will cause a lot of wasted effort in the coming months and years.
> 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.
> what kind of people the maintainers are.
Can you elaborate on this? It's new that we're judging what kind of people we're dealing with based on what tools they use.
I really meant -- are these maintainers passionate about the design and maintenance of their tools, are they trying to slop up a demo fast enough that some VC buys them out, is this project a goal in itself or the means to some other end, etc...
Open source software that exists for its own sake is exceedingly rare, and understanding the goals of a community before becoming dependent on it is a good idea
OK! This makes sense, and I agree. But I don't think banning LLM usage gets us there. LLMs are going to be used for coding, whether anyone likes it or not. I think focusing on the effort and care that is put into the codebase is a good metric: LLM generated code that is reviewed by teams of professionals, for example, is a huge win, and should be encouraged.
I readily concede that there is a huge volume of inexperienced programmers generating crap, though.
It's basically Eternal September for programming.
If you made this statement and you catch a serial killer using your software, it affects the options. A more reasonable example may be: Microsoft may not reverse engineer this. They still can do it privately - you can't enforde it - but if you catch them, then you have more options besides saying "welp, I said they could"
> Only if you can reasonably separate LLM from non LLM code, which is in no way a solved problem.
It's trivial to detect when someone's coding with a chatbot - they tell you, repeatedly.
Nobody who doesn't code with a chatbot worries that it's hard to tell.
Apparently some people have compared it to some other unlikable groups of people (I know this because a vibecoder complained about the comparison someone else made)
If someone has to ask whether their software is mostly AI-written, then it is.
If someone has to ask exactly how racist you have to be before you can be called a nazi, they're probably a nazi.
If someone has to ask how attracted to underage girls they can be before they're a pedophile, they're a pedophile.
If someone has to ask how responsible you have to be for a death before it's a murder, they're probably a murderer.
Because people who aren't these things clearly know that they aren't.
> 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.
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
In this corresponding blog post, one point made is that LLMs tend to LARP big-project infrastructure on small projects. They use the resources for something like GNOME but they aren't actually GNOME so they don't have any excuse for it.
Both. They noticed the high resource usage of LLMs and decided that LLMs, in general, aren't worth supporting.
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.
Do we have a tool that can detect whether a project is majority LLM-written? This is an unenforceable rule, unless it's just coming down to vibes and they're going to decide what projects to ban based on their feelings.
They are monitoring their resource usage. If they find a resource leak and it's traced to an LLM project, they will delete it.
Terms of use should be read as a statement of intent, not a series of if-then statements.
> It is an unenforceable rule
Are you sure? It's pretty easy to find telltale signs of LLM usage, like the CLAUDE.md file, the '.cursor' directory, the 'vim'-sized codebase done in a week.
That's just vibes. Measuring how much data someone uses is concrete and empirical. They are implementing TOS rules that are based on judgement and require a judge. Very different when implemented practically, especially in terms of effort on the part of the org. Quotas are automated, evicting projects is highly manual.
> That's just vibes.
They are not. You can probably draft some query to get candidates based on those criteria. And so very quickly.
> Quotas are automated, evicting projects is highly manual.
The human world is very chaotic. Automation is not a panacea, which is highlighted by Big Tech abysmal support. Sometimes, you want humans to judge, because the optimal result is based on heuristics and not rules written in stone.
Non-profits like Codeberg are resource-constrained. Apple is delaying app reviews and degrading the reviews that are done because of a slew of AI-generated app. Codeberg is basically adding a "human must review things" step to solve the "we have too much traffic" problem. As a bonus, they are instituting a process that's not only costly, but is vulnerable to being co-opted to ban projects that are not desired for any reason. It's just a naive policy mistake. Time will tell. Let's revisit in 2 years.
I think you are wrong. A better way is to have a free tier and charge for usage.
Codeberg is a registered non-profit charity whose purpose is to provide free services for free software projects. You can make a different site that works the way you want it to.
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.
https://github.com
[dead]
Maybe that's the inevitable fate of free hosting platforms that allow use by LLMs.
Yeah, the natural solution here is to only offer some amount of hosting for free and then charge for larger amounts of code to host. Those quotas are something that is empirical and observable and can be managed. But instead, they're implementing a rule that is unenforceable because you can't actually validate whether or not the majority of the project was written by an LLM. They just chose a suboptimal path and pissed a bunch of people off in the process, and their terms of service makes this out like some kind of copyright or security issue. It's just silly.
Terms of use are a statement of intent, not an if-else ladder to be executed by a computer.
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.
That's no sense. People learn in different ways. Multiple people just copied and pasted from stack overflow. Other learned from that. Same with AI
Did you... read my post? The first thing I posted in this thread was a direct quote from the Satzung. Did you think "education" was about learning the history of the Ottoman Empire..?
Your first post has nothing about "learning", it comes from the Satzung, but it has 0 contact with really. Typical Berlin
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.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930
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.
What even is a "GitHub alternative"? By starting the discussion from an existing product instead of one's actual needs, one has already lost.
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]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. 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?[0] <https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up>
[1] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/PrivacyPolicy.md>
[2] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/TermsOfUse.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...
It's actually quite easy to enforce this because almost everyone who's vibecoding tells you they are.
> ...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
> ...and "most ToSes are unenforceable"...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?
Ironically they currently show a huge banner that LLM-generated content is restricted and crypto is no longer allowed.
No one is reading the ToS you know that very well. That you point out basic advice about ToS is satirical.
If a service like this has some surprising limitations for a potential user, it should be clear up front and not hidden in the ToS. Considering my first paragraph, they know that too.
Someone who has no interest in reading ~two pages of a document written at a middle school reading level in order to find out what their hosts do and don't want to host also has no interest in reading popups, "toasts", and other such notifications on the topic. People who don't want to read aren't going to read.
What I'd suggest to you is that you go out and get head scritches and/or snuggles from a cutie. Not only will this provide you with a fun and positive social interaction, it'll give you the energy required to complain about things that you actually care about, and maybe even make some progress towards fixing them.
I think I kept on the conversation, but you are not interested.
> I think I kept on the conversation...
You didn't.
> I didn't look into codeberg really
So, politely, why are you posting?
Politely why your are asking?
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.
> 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.
No all of these examples have historically been single contributor
1,500 curl authors: https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2026/07/25/1500-curl-authors/
> 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.
The fun thing about communities is they can allow or disallow whoever they want, and if you don't like their decisions you can find a community more closely aligned with you.
Codeberg is a service.
Where do they market themselves that way?
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.
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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 do not believe they will kick off a serious project that only uses hundreds of kilobytes just because it isn't big yet. I believe they are saying they don't want things like dotfiles repos (unless many people are using your dotfiles) or one-off scripts. The rules are not for interpretation by a computer program - they are a BDFL trying to communicate what he likes and doesn't like.
Funnily enough, my dotfiles were actually one of the things I was storing on Codeberg! Still, it's Codeberg's platform and it's their choice, but I absolutely will not host my repos on a platform whose BDFL can wake up and decide they're not welcome. At least I can sleep mostly peacefully hosting these things on my own forge.
Where is your forge server, physically?
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.
My current understanding is it's fine if you are trying to build something serious but it isn't there yet. They don't want to host your internal tools, one-off scripts or dotfiles that aren't useful to anyone but you.
That thread is fascinating, to say the least.
It really highlights why I have avoided Mastodon entirely.
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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.
Mastodon loves to tout its technical decentralization but it's one of the most politically and culturally monolithic (and intolerant) spaces I've ever seen.
This quote really sticks out (it's arguing against sticking with free software's core principles):
> bwahahahahahaha are u gonna preach “no politics” now too. free software is inherently dogmatic, screw playing centrist
Thanks for linking that thread, it told me everything I needed to know.
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...
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.
> 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-...
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.
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.
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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?
Sure but wouldn’t the sensible rule be implementing a user rate limit?
I think that can be argued for, yes.
I would fear it’s too little too late. If the concern was the frequency and utilization of resources from agents coding that would have been the instant and fair fix. As it stand it’s a statement about AI usage which is fine but I think the better alternative would be to start a new nonprofit service that was unbiased.
> 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.
>> Are you consciously choosing to completely ignore > Let me stop you right there: Yes
Reading this in text is unreasonably funny. Thanks for the chuckle
Yeah, it's pretty clear that they're instituting rules that they haven't thought about deeply, and they just need to reduce traffic by any means necessary, and they'll use any excuse they can to minimize traffic, whether that's banning LLM code because it could be malicious and has unclear copyright status, or any other reason that they can come up with. The fact that their terms of use don't match up with their blog post about it demonstrates this pretty clearly.
But I don't have a horse in this race. I self-host my code using Fossil.
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.
One helpful way to think about is to what extent your principles are rooted in emotions or rigidity, or whether your principles are rooted more in realism and practicality.
Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
> Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
Why would the latter be better than the former ?
In your mind, why are the second kinds of things here not "criteria" or "heuristics"?
(Also you can enclose things in * to emphasize on this site btw. There is a little grey 'help' next to the comment box.)
> why are the second kinds of things here not "criteria" or "heuristics"?
I think you're asking why I call the heuristics for navigating the world "principles"?
Principles come in 3 distinct flavors:
a) Rule of conduct. The standard you hold yourself to regardless of circumstance or convenience. Examples can be honesty, fairness, loyalty, or non-violence.
b) Organizing idea in a field. General concept that explains or governs range of specific cases. They're not moral rules, they're explanatory or decision-making frameworks.
c) Foundational truth or law. Basic proposition that underlies a system of thought. E.g. conservation of energy is principle that isn't proven within the system but a foundation the rest of the system is built on. Axioms play the same role in logic or mathematics.
In this thread, I'm using principles in the (b) sense, whereas I think the author of the article and some of the sentiment in the discussion anchor on the (a) sense.
In practice, one has to find a balance you can live with between (a) and (b), since they can be in tension.
Hm OK, thanks for the lesson here. To be clear, it kinda seems like in your original comment you are using both the (a) and (b) senses, but just making a prescriptive point about (b), right?
I think in this schema, I am still saying a good (b) principle for anyone is probably something like "have knowledge of the (a)s of things and people you depend on, so you can know if any of your other (b)s might cause some conflict down the line".
> 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.
No. LLMs and blockchain are the same kind of shit.
What do you mean by no? Can you read their minds? Their reputation suggests that, yes, they’ll likely block something else.
Your words betray your prejudice, nothing more.
There's a thing called reputation. It has nothing to do with prejudice.
What you call "reputation" is just your prejudice.
That's just your bullshit. Reputation exists and words have meanings, regardless of your opinion on that.
Reputation is collective prejudice.
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.
> We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.
you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
Supposing you know someone's motivation as if you have access to their psyche is a very unproductive way to participate in a discussion.
The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.
That's a very good point. What if codeberg decides tomorrow that they got weary of all worldly affairs, and from then on will only host dev tools?
Yet those same Linux geeks have now decided not to take a "stand" against AI, but rather embrace it. Twenty years ago when the Afghanistan and Iraqi wars raged on, did they oppose working with the military contractors at Red Hat or the NSA? No, they focused on the mission.
Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
> Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
He's known for staying focused on one single issue, which is important for personal reasons unrelated to group affiliations.
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.
Did RMS ever call people fascists for simply trying to discuss the proposed change?
RMS headed a political organization, and kept his political campaigning to things directly related to the politics that his organization represented.
The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.
Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.
> Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions
Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.
But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.
The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.
Taking a stand against LLMs certainly seems pretty related to the politics of the FOSS movement.
Wasn't it because he said it was okay to breed 16 year old girls or something?
The point is that he did not even try to link his view about sex and age of consent into anything to do with open source.
I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).
He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.
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The politicians and other people with power to make things worse are those who correspond to Hitler in your analogy. Stallman is more like a random ex-Nazi (he no longer holds those views) so like a huge chunk of the postwar German population.
"nice things" you mean upholding the harm of the status quo by not criticizing it
So youre proposing that everyone should always be criticizing every unjust thing in the world or else they're upholding the status quo?
By that silly logic I guess codeberg is supporting the uyghur genocide because they don't mention it.
No, I mean that voicing opinions in specialist spaces is rarely seen as bothersome when they uphold the status quo, but the minute they don't they're "making it political"
Edit: casual sinophobia BTW
Until proven otherwise, Codeberg's operations have nothing to do with the uyghur genocide though.
There's nothing to prove when you posit your responsibility is limitless.
Codeberg is in Germany yet I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine, which they helped finance by building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas. I guess by ops logic that means codeberg is in favor of Russian aggression.
Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this.
Yet,
> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine
that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.
https://blog.codeberg.org/one-year-into-the-war-your-help-is...
> I guess by ops logic
I don't think so. Them being involved or not in the thing makes all the difference.
Could be. Why not ask them and find out? Or upload a project to help the Russian war and see if they take it down?
Rather using self-hosted Gitea, software developed by a for-profit Chinese company, is actually supporting the uyghur genocide. Shame on you.
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.
Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.
> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".
Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company
Early Firefox was the example. Looking at Firefox's market share decline since Eich got replaced reinforces the point though.
I get tired of it because it just becomes a tit for tat war and you end up with these extremely polarized communities.
Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on, but it would be nice if open source communities were a bit more open. There will always be a line to draw but some of the current rules feel arbitrary.
> Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on
To be fair, that seems like a bit of an odd detail to obsess over.
A service could be bright pink for all I care* as long as it just works without me having to worry about checking their blog for the latest decrees being handed down on a daily basis.
* Take that with a grain of salt because my - in some people's eyes - questionable stylistic choices are the direct cause of a couple hundred userstyles and scripts out there.
How is that fair or odd? I don’t want to pop up anime furry girls while I am using a service? Not sure why you think or suggest I am obsessed with it just a choice. Odd comment to make.
It’s a choice to not use it but also a choice the folks that decide to keep it shown.
It is absolutely that communities choice but I see it as a tell for how the folks think about running their community and as these new rules are being made aligns with the assumptions I already made.
Similar to how I migrated from post hog when then created that fabulously confusing OS UI. Or I wouldn’t use a service that used Pepe memes.
The whole Fedora infrastructure shows the default cute Anubis character (while protecting said infrastructure from AI scrappers) & I don't see any problems with that. :)
Is there a bypass for those yet? Not all of the machines I have run it at a reasonable pace, so I'd like to just farm the challenge to some other machine.
My nice desktop that I use for C++/Rust/Formal Verification takes multiple minutes sometimes, and I'd rather not replace the motherboard over this, or figure out why it's not using the GPU/whatever.
OTOH, I have a MacBook with Apple's terrible window manager. It blows through it in a few seconds. The same is true of my ancient phone, and some newer low-power mini-pc's, etc.
It exists. Search up POW blocker or Anubis blocker extensions.
Just set your user agent to wget.
I don’t object to anime or furry art. I just think shared infrastructure serving a broad technical audience is better off staying visually neutral. Once branding starts signaling subcultures, the discussion too often shifts from the software to identity. Given the other decisions some of these communities have made it makes sense. Not for me but that’s ok!
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.
Forgejo is pretty crazy easy to setup if you have a server with some storage already. It can be set to lock out people by default
I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.
No one's guaranteed to third-party hosting or communities. The software is there. Host it.
If no third-party or community wants to take you in, then I suppose you're going to have to start one for like-minded people. If there aren't any, then I suppose you've lost the marketplace of ideas.
Isn't that how this is supposed to work?
Gitea is china-ware that doesn’t share values with most FOSS.
if you have ssh access to a server, setup is as easy as
Done.The remote URL is user@host:myproject (relative to user home dir) or user@host:/home/user/myproject (absolute path)
That works for private repositories, but public facing ones require a little more than that.
I have been self-hosting Gitea since long before Forgejo existed, but I understood the parent to be talking about third-party hosting with a FOSS community around it.
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Is there a another platform with more users/better quality users?
lobste.rs
Hn without the VC taint
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_source-code-host...
There is Radicle for completely distributed hosting.
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.
Amuses me that Codeberg and Sourcehut have the same naming scheme. What's next - SLoCbarn? Header Haven? Function City?
Repohaus
ssh server git init --bare repo.git && git clone server:repo.git
we're rapidly movement towards an internet where it will be the bad actors hiding their "personal baggage", who will end up in a little corner. as it should be. it's those people who have harmed the world at a global scale. by asking to separate technology from personal & societal values
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.
So, I guess Codeberg doesn't meet the free software bar any more. The FSF defines four freedoms, and they are all pretty clearly being violated by the no LLM policy. They're blocking people based on how they use codeberg (freedom 0), preventing less experienced users from improving / modifying code (freedom 1), based on an argument that you can modify software, but only how they tell you to, and certainly not with an LLM (freedom 2), and of course they are blocking a distribution channel based on these criteria (freedom 3).
In summary: A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
I guess no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, but they've intentionally and significantly lowered the bar with these decisions. I'm happy they did this before I bothered to migrate. Does anyone know of a good alternative to Forgejo? I was thinking of self hosting, but now I just want nothing to do with this organization.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms
Codeberg is a service, not software. If we applied this standard then Codeberg would already have been in violation of the 4 Freedoms because they forbid distribution of CSAM (I would hope).
Forgejo is unaffected by this because it's the software not the service and is not subject to the service's terms of service. You're misunderstanding the scope of this policy change.
I tried to address this when I pointed out no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, and the FSF also addressed it with the word "adequately".
The policy change means that some free software projects are no longer welcome on codeberg, specifically because those projects take a stronger stance towards protecting free software than codeberg.
What am I misunderstanding? Why should I trust them as stewards of forgejo?
Why shouldn't you? Linus won't let me post erotic Sonic fanfiction to the mailing list, but I still trust Linux to be a safe platform to write erotic Sonic fanfiction.
I thought "don't like it, fork it" was the open source credo? You don't have to trust them as stewards. Fork and maintain it yourself then.
Forgejo was forked from gitea when the later introduced some controversial business strategies. Gitea was forked from Gogs because gogs did not accept outside contributions.
See a trend? Maybe you can be the next.
I am not well informed on this Codeberg story, but could this simply be a way for them to avoid some of the destructive loads that GitHub has been experiencing since "vibe coding" became a thing? Maybe the code origin purity test is just a way to explain it?
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/23/codeberg-gi...
(1) Cache the non logged-in pages. You can even host static pages in an unmetered way. They maintain their web service software. They should just do that. If an account is knocking over infra by scraping, ban the account. Make it slightly harder to sign up or something, if necessary.
(2) Vibe coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and the grok thing all prefer local copies of a project to scraping web services. Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
(3) If they are worried about AI companies shifting costs (What costs though? See point 1), they should block training scrapers, or - even better - offer a service that resells zero-log-retention / enclaved open-weight LLM inference. This cuts off the revenue stream to the AI companies, and probably lets codeberg skim a bit to expand their own services.
We used to use github at work. It was falling over well before cursor was a thing. Blaming AI for their 1-2 nines of availability is... questionable.
Yes, I am not trying to make any excuses for GitHub, however I recall one tweet that made my eyes bug-out:
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
https://xcancel.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
> Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
Because a significant percentage of "developers using LLM" have no clue what they are doing?
They said vibe coded projects are consuming excessive CI resources
The Codeberg blog post does mention those costs, but also a lot of other objections they have to LLMs so not simply away to avoid the loads. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.
Codeberg isn't software so the FSF's definition of software freedom is not relevant.
The essay "Who Does That Server Really Serve?" from the FSF explains why their definition of software freedom is more relevant for SaaS than it is for proprietary software:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
In it Stallman gets dangerously close to admitting it's possible to be worse than Microsoft Windows. After documenting spyware and universal back doors in Windows, the section of the article comparing proprietary software to SaaS concludes:
SaaSS is equivalent to running proprietary software with spyware and a universal back door. It gives the server operator unjust power over the user, and unjust power is something we must resist.
It even has a section towards the end addressing the slippery slopes that github-style services provide:
Use of simple software repositories is not SaaSS because most of the actual work (as distinguished from redistribution) is done in the contributors' computers. However, when the repository starts doing other kinds of computing work for the users, such as running tests, that starts to cross the line. When the users are contributing to the project, so the work is the project's work rather than the contributor's work, that still is not SaaSS for the users. But it may be SaaSS for the project. However, if the testing means running the programs that the project develops, it is not SaaSS because the project does control the crucial software being run.
Forgejo, the software powering Codeberg, is FOSS.
Yes, but Forgejo is developed by Codeberg, which, according to the FSF essay's criteria, is offering an unethical product that undermines user freedom.
You haven't provided any evidence that Codeberg is trustworthy.
> The FSF defines four freedoms, and they are all pretty clearly being violated by the no LLM policy.
No they're not. The four freedoms apply only to software licences.
Codeberg is not software.
Forgejo is, and remains FOSS.
Codeberg provides a free service and is under no obligation to cater to cryptobros and vibecoders. You can buy a VM and host your own.
Not sure why this is down voted.
You cannot support FOSS and then get mad when people use those freedoms to create a service that matches their ideas and philosophies.
I'm not mad that they have a fork of some FOSS software that they use. I'm upset that they're actively trying to take away other people's freedom under the banner of a non-profit whose mission is to support FOSS software projects.
That's worse than just some random group lying loudly about its intentions. They're getting tax benefits that probably should be yanked unless they change their charter. They also accepted donations to further the existing charter, and they're doing the opposite.
I didn't know that providing a service to some people but not others was taking away freedom.
If you click to another tab, the site changes its title and favicon to a random webpage like:
- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube
- Amazon.com: waifu pillow
When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js
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).
One of them is a website that hosts source code from other users, their "stance" is arguably more important because of that. The other one is just a personal blog, completely different subjects. I created an account just to reply to this.
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.
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.
How do you browse cloudflare + anubis sites like that?
(Asking because they've both become routine problems for me with most browsers, probably since I disable cookies + run an ad blocker).
Yeah, every day brings choices. I tend to allow a first party js from every small site, and that covers Anubis and the even more egregious use case of Mastodon instances. Needing 100KB of Js to display 140 chars :eyeroll:
I still haven't allowed Cloudflare, though. That is bounce or incognito.
I'm increasingly tempted to just archive.is 100% of anubis page loads or something like that, then instruct my LLM to try archive.is if it sees anubis. If there was a plugin for this, it'd probably get close to 100% cache hit rate for agents pretty quickly. The plugin could even have an MCP endpoint that popped up windows for me to solve captchas or whatever in my primary browsing session, then uploaded the result to the shared cache.
Archive.is blocks agents, I think, but you get the idea.
Also, I really wonder what the economics are for your example. The JS boilerplate for the anubis landing page is usually longer than the piece of information I need.
(That's ignoring the actual anubis JS, which is probably on a privacy-destroying shared CDN link).
Well, my lens tends to be geopolitical rather than economic. Privacy isn't some axiomatic metric for me. I just decide if someone is an ally and I am willing to put up with the cost of their action. With Anubis I don't see it being suborned yet by non-allies like big companies. But I'm definitely watching for that.
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 am fine with the "degraded" experience. I eventually gave up because I got served captcha loops instead of the actual site. All I need from an untrusted site is to read text which shouldn't require JavaScript.
They warn against JavaScript being on by default and recommend using it only on trusted websites. It's a solid advice.
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.
The JS file has been quietly removed.
Oh, I didn't know that. Thanks!
For me it still happens, the file has just been renamed to /js/kill.<giant hash>.js
We're back to square one, then. :)
I was wondering if the hash might be unique, then a commenter would say "it's now `kill.<hash xyz>.js`, and the webmaster would be able to connect <hash XYZ> to a user agent and IP. It wouldn't accomplish anything, but it might be fun.
> 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.
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 recommend Codefloe, runs forgejo and the hosting is EU-based
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.
> 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.
That was never much of a problem on the old internet. It's just something corporations made us feel entitled to. You don't use the same memorized password for all your really unimportant accounts and forget about them after you're done?
There's always the email option, too. "Found a bug? Email bugs@example.com." - that's the original decentralised discussion forum.
> It's just something corporations made us feel entitled to
Entitled? It's a necessity due to everyone and their dog either getting hacked or selling email addresses to spammers outright.
If you're on HN surely you have your own domain. Give out servicename@domain.com and block any that spam you
> 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...
We've gotten used to stuff like GitHub just existing, the same way Windows (up to XP) just exists. If you have a Windows XP computer it keeps working indefinitely. Corporations dumping taught us to expect the same with online services that need constant maintenance.
Plague ships are not welcome in all ports.
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?
No we can't. Because my opinion is that a government should punish speech in certain cases, e.g. speech that is against the human dignity of other people or speech that is dangerous (e.g. yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theatre.
We delegate these rules to governments to secure the individuals rights to life, liberty, and happiness (as your declaration of independence so wonderfully puts), not because we want to allow shitheads to allow to shittalk. This is just a side-effect we all have to endure, because we don't want governments to police all speech.
That means also in the US not everything you could say goes unpunished by the government, especially if you're not white, male and christian. Remember, the police is part of the government and if they can shoot you because they thought they have seen a gun, they can also shoot you because of what you said.
On top of that we, collectively, form governments for (among others) the purpose of protecting each others speech, not just from governments, but from each other, from our bosses, coorporations, from the police. That means, we collectively, use the government as a governing body tho whom we delegated certain powers. Where to draw the line is different in different regions of the earth. For example the female nipple printed in many European newspapers would not be protected speech in the US for puritan religious reasons.
Yeah instead corporations, which are more powerful than the government, harm you for your speech.
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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.
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.
Do the other rules bother you the same way? Like the one about racial discrimination? I mean, there's no surefire way to identify racial discrimination.
Racial discrimination can have fringe cases but is at least something you can often clearly see. You can not detect the intention but you can often see the outcome. But yes. Other rules that are unenforceable without reading tea leaves are also a problem.
It's lucky that the rules aren't enforced by a computer program, isn't it?
Not really. I'd rather have decisions that are not made on gut feeling. I'd still rather have a human make the decision but based on facts not feelings.
People make a decision that something is racially discriminatory based on facts.
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.
> 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.
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?).
> people hate change
Not related, but this is an assumption one should automatically reject as soon as it comes to mind.
People do like change, when it is for the better. People have happily moved from SVN to Git, from Vi to Neovim, from Coke to Pepsi (find better examples yourself) etc... People may be emotional about change, but they are not stubborn (generally). Usually they just don't perceive the benefits of the new thing (or they are outweighed by the drawbacks for them). Sometimes "better" has a subjective part that you can't argue about, so you have to "agree to disagree". But it's better to disagree on an opinion than to assume that they don't like change.
There is a legitimate and probably significant set of people who agree with the pro-free software, copyleft, non-commercial etc outlook but don't have the same analysis of AI and LLM-generated tooling. There was nothing in the terms of use prior to this move to indicate those tools were out of bounds or that those opinions were unwelcome. Nor anything about tool use at all.
All those people were just told they're not welcome.
BTW the nuance in the blog post is retroactive and done after the vote was completed. The vote had no such nuance and requests for clarification were refused.
> 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.
yes, I am also disappointed by this arrogance.
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.
So it's bad that someone can say how they think people should vote? Aren't you also saying how you think people should have voted?
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.
*everyone
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.
It isn't virtue signalling if they actually do it. Then it is just virtuous.
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.
Why not ask your AI to create Vibeberg?
> 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 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...
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.
The most coherent argument I have heard is that LLM output might not be copyrightable. This matches what most courts have said, and is the assumption the entire industry is working under. There are probably eventually going to be cases where the LLM copies something verbatim, and then the courts will have to come up with some refinement to their tests. The legal exposure for this for codeberg is basically zero in the US, thanks to the DMCA.
So, their "copyright status is unclear" stance seems to be saying "it is unclear if the contributor can copyright the code, or if it cannot be copyrighted", but that argument does not make any sense:
"Not copyrightable" means "no one has a right to enforce a copyright on this".
If that is their objection, they need to run scrubs for public domain works + delete those too. God help them if they want to host old UNIX software. Unless someone has renewed the copyrights on stuff written before 1979, the copyright has already lapse, making it "not copyrightable".
If, alternatively, they're worried about inadvertent plagiarism, then they already have to have mechanisms to deal with intentional plagiarism, so no action is required.
If they're trying to impose their values on users by micromanaging acceptable use of third parties' computers, well, I agree: That's explicitly in violation of the definition of Free and Open Source software, so they're basically just ignoring their non-profit mission statement.
That is a good point. You could not host public domain code there, and there are quite important FOSS projects that are public domain - as well as the the old code you mentioned there is current stuff such as SQLite.
> The legal exposure for this for codeberg is basically zero in the US, thanks to the DMCA.
They are in Germany and they distribute software globally (i.e. you can clone or download code from anywhere) so zero liability in the US is not enough.
I think you are being rather harsh on them, but I think your point is more evidence that the real reasons are the ones in the blog, and they should probably remove copyright as a justification in the ToS.
I don't really understand international copyright laws at this point (too many jurisdictions), but, given the number of global sites that can only exist because of the DMCA (like YouTube), I assume there are comparable carve outs allowing platforms to host user uploaded content without being sued out of existence, as long as they pull copyright violations down reasonably quickly.
> 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.
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.
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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.
I suspect they already did this a few times and then concluded, "you know what? This whole LLM thing is stupid. Why do we waste our time adjusting their resource limits when we could just remove the whole thing?"
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.
> 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.
[0]: https://x.com/eigen_moomin/status/2077471686295957749
That is, indeed, stable and predictable.
It's because a lot of free software people are in Germany. Nothing more, nothing less. This may be related to the policy of teaching everyone fluent English as a second language since elementary school, or to the old school Chaos Computer Club.
Because it's run by German people living in Germany? Feel free to move to Anguilla and start an Anguillan one following Anguillan laws.
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.
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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.
Are they even part of the community, or do they show up, demand resources, and leave?
There are registered paying members with voting rights. You can easily become one. Clearly not many of them are vibecoders.
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.
Will give it a go! Thanks for tooting! You've just made my afternoon!
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. :-)
It’s interesting how many revolutions and even small efforts surrounding the concept of freedom very quickly go from “freedom” to “no actually I mean freedom for things I like”.
It’s a constant pattern.
Principles are hard I guess.
I know. So many platforms don't provide freedom for CSAM.
I think there is space in “things that are illegal / harm” and other choices.
Freedom in general is always a compromise to some extent.
It's interesting how your concept of freedom very quickly went from “freedom” to “no actually I mean freedom for things I like”.
Principles are hard, I guess.
Naw most people have concepts about freedom and harming others like you describe.
"no actually I mean freedom for the things most people like"?
I mean freedom that doesn’t violate other people’s freedoms, like your CSAM example.
Drawn CSAM doesn't violate anyone's freedoms.
I feel like that’s a personal topic with you and the idea that someone draws some content and somehow certifies “it’s ok” has plenty of obvious issues unrelated to the topic.
I'm pushing you to make your own beliefs as consistent as you demand from everyone else, and you're failing to.
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.
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.
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.
I'll kindly disagree with you here. After you posted this reply, I have received an email, whose subject reads: "AI writes code in seconds, but here's what it's missing".
The mail, coming from Atlassian, is encouraging people to let swarms of agents loose to "develop" something from a simple prompt, and suggesting Jira can act as a context store with all the new features they implemented.
So, people are expected to make "coding with an LLM" their personality or modus operandi, unfortunately.
I agree that the discourse can be gentler, kinder and have a more open stance, yet Mastodon has this 500 character limit which causes statements to go blunt. I experience the same problem while trying to post there.
However, this doesn't invalidate Codeberg's stance. There's a slop problem everywhere, and people want to stop or slow it down. I'm in the same camp with Codeberg, and don't want vibe-coded applications pushed as man-made creations.
Also, to reiterate, Codeberg doesn't hardline the policy. They effectively ban vibe-coded projects, and if that matters, this is why I like them, and why I like some other services I use.
To close, yes, people are irritated by AI powered vibe-coding and respond too harshly, but I can understand them. Maybe we should understand why the "ugly" response exists before shunning them, so we can arrive to a more constructive place.
> 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?
[0]: https://github.com/ctoth/qns
[1]: https://github.com/ctoth/z-core
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.
Nope, personally this enters full vibe-coding territory for me, and I won't approach this code with a 30 feet pole isolated in a container running in a VM.
Sorry, but seriously.
If it works (and we constantly see LLMs cheat to pass tests), and helps someone, more power to you and them, but no, this is what vibe-coding squarely is, and what Codeberg explicitly excludes.
I see two big problems with that codebase: - No human, incl. you can modify this meaningfully. - The AI wrote it won't be able to touch it again, too.
So it's write-once software, and this is the biggest problem with vibe-coded software.
> 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.
"mostly" is the operative word. Use of generative AI is allowed.
Codeberg is run by a German association, which defines its role in the bylaws to support FOSS (§2 in the bylaws). You can use their software Forgejo to run your own server.
A 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).
Think this convinced me to move over.
Curious about what in the article convinced you.
Same here, I might actually migrate.
When I read the issues thread on Codeberg, it reaffirmed my decision to self-host my Git repositories and mirror them to GitHub, GitLab, and Codeberg. At the time, I chose this approach because Codeberg already had its "no private repos" rule in place. I know they don't ban all private repos, but still, I wonder: Did they have bad experiences with private repos, LLMs, or crypto projects? Or is this a preemptive measure?
However, Github and Others can also ban or delete my stuff anytime. But the feeling is a different. Because now I'm thinking what's next?
Tolerance is a beautiful thing, but it can also be painful. Perhaps, in general, it's better to make individual decisions rather than relying on sweeping statements.
Banning LLMs and crypto sounds more like a move made by a fearful, angry person and has little to do with openness.
The facts I was missing (also in the article):
The changes made by Codeberg e.V. are:
First:
> 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).
Second:
> - Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects.
Now, I know them. IC no issue.
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.
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..."
> 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.
I have made it VERY clear that I am talking about FREEdom, not the price. I have to assume your comment is in bad faith.
Fortunately, Codeberg is not free software. It's a service provider providing a service. They themselves can be as non-neutral and non-free as they like. The software beneath it all remains free.
Seriously, just host your own Forgejo if it's that much of a problem. It's right there.
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
> You think Stallman and Torvalds did what they did because they were neutral?
Is that a joke? Both have made it abundantly clear that yes, this is their stance. Let me quote literally the FIRST freedom RMS put into writing:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
This is explicitly free and neutral. "for any purpose", no restrictions. Linus endorsed this stance by licensing the kernel under GPLv2, and has repeatedly upheld this view ever since, making the argument again and again that he does not want to restrict what people do with the project.
Even in his famous announcement message, before adopting GPL, Linus said:
> I'm doing a (free) operating system
Then he licensed Linux with his own free license, before adopting GPL.
> Full source must be available (and free)
Freedom is and has always been important to both RMS and Linus.
> If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?
No. In fact it is one of the freedoms guaranteed by free software.
> By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions
There are people making that argument, but there are also people arguing that guaranteeing freedom requires more conditions. There is no real consensus on this question.
GPLv2 s far from being neutral
Is Linux neutral against proprietary forks?
Read the comment again. I address this directly.
The problem with slippery slopes is that you never stop midway.
Banning any form of legal, libre software, shows that you are not floss friendly and I do not want to host my code with organizations like yours. I dropped sourcehut when they banned cryptocurrency software and today I drop you.
Looks like I'm going back to self-hosting and accepting patches via email.
I have seen so much governance weirdness from Codeberg over the years that it isn't even on the radar to migrate to. GitHub has gotten less stable, I wouldn't mind an alternative, but Codeberg just wouldn't ever be that. To be fair I am just on the sidelines seeing net commentary so it may not be a fair take but it doesn't change that point.
Do people know Codeberg well and migrate to it anyways, or they just don't know? If the former, wondering what gets you to that point.
>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.
I have ~100 repos on github and only a few of them with LLM assistance. Aside from a few comments and a PR here and there throughout the years nobody cares about them. I have to assume it's the same for the majority of developers.
That's why I have two remotes
origin --> codeberg github --> github
I may add others. Redundancy is a good thing.
I used to think that good governance made good policy, but I now realize that it’s used to justify the people making the policy. So all that really matters is picking the right people to make the policy .
In this case, you seem to have a robust democratic process, with a not for profit board, membership, voting rights and more.
Meanwhile GitHub had a better policy despite having the worst possible governance model from an open source perspective (it was a corporation, and likely mostly top down for most of its meaningful development).
But thankfully GitHub was full of great people for the first 15 years or so.
Another very american understanding of censorship. In Germany (where Codeberg is registered), censorship means censorship by a government. A private entity (Verein) deciding what and how they want to run their business is typically not considered censorship (maybe the term "private censorship" could work), but just "freedom of doing business". So if you want to argue FOR freedom, you could also turn this argument around and support the fact that a private entity should be able to decide whatever the fuck they want to do with their own service offering.
I don't view this decision as censorship, more like anti spam...
Actually, the American understanding of censorship,(the first amendment) is exactly the same. It only counts if the government does it.
It's way overblown...
The "anti LLM" or "no AI" clause is really more a "covering all ass" clause.
If you want to improve Forgejo and have that AI PR; you better clean it up of all traces - resulting in a PR that is likely neat and going to be merged.
I see no issue with that. It simply enforces a pace and process that is very befitting and in my opinion mandatory for such a central system they're maintaining.
> 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.
As long as you don't insult someone or support Palestine it shouldn't be a problem. German speech law is strict, but predictable. Although there was originally no law against supporting Palestine - it was a reinterpretation of the anti-Nazi laws - I believe they've now made it a law.
This prompted me to revisit my own decision to avoid Codeberg by re-reading their Terms of Use[1]. A few things stand out:
This means I can't use Codeberg for personal projects that aren't intended for public consumption, especially if I used Claude Code to whip them up. Oh well, this is why I self-host Forgejo.For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:
> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.
> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
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?
Yes that's correct. They don't want you, they say good riddance. They want to support free software.
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?
Nah, i mostly self host my stuff and if i need anything public I’ll go with providers that don’t nag me with their ideology of the month
Dumb question, but how do they know if a codebase is actually written by an LLM? I know that sometimes code agents write "Co-authored by" in the commit messages, but this is something you can over-write.
OP might want to give Radicle a try: https://radicle.network
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
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.
I don't understand why people still bother with these kind of choices anymore. Why not just write your own service and self-host? I just vibed a git hosting thing and it has been running fine for some months.
I agree with Codeberg, I think they're arguing for some sort of AI Code-Gen Fair Use policy.
My take: If ai generated the code, let ai pay for it, unless it has been proved worth it's upkeep. Basically, show me some sort of: AI code-gen proof of work (or proof of worth, some mechanism), then you're in.
Automation at ai-scale are very expensive, just look at the trillions of USD being spent by ai companies. And let's not forget, that the rest of us don't have those levels of funding. And neither do non-profits like Codeberg i'm guessing.
And some more, i'm not even considering security issues, where for instance ai code-gen turns on hosting/platform providers (similar to chapgpt incident on hugginfaces). even if the sandbox proves resilient, the code is parasitic in nature or behaves like a virus.
Are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
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.
I don't recall exactly which one has javascript mandatory (namely is gated with 'whatwg cartel' web engines): this very codeberg or sourcehut?
I understand Codeberg's standpoint. From their point of view I think it is only reasonable to sticking to your guns as well as mentioning, that at the end of the day there is no free lunch and LLM coding may be bloat to them.
I know the European scene since the 80th and know, that all projects are not what the rest of world think they are: free, and an alternative to anything that is US based.
European software devs are activists in the old-school meaning. In the 80th, they were crackers, hackers, and they looked for likeminded people. BTX scandal is only for very old veterans, as well as von Gravenreuth or Highscore.
I was part of the C64, Amiga scene and still have many friends their. Nevertheless we have very different attitudes today.
Without any irony I finally hope that people finally value that is provided by GitHub or other services from the Valley.
Trashing them or thinking, you just needed to host a service outside the US makes it a viable option is naiv.
I respect EU's and European devs' decisions, but I would never ever rely on them. I love the US and happy to be almost 100% not using European services.
Yes it reads "Software development, but free! Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort..." but you didn't know Germans or the fineprint. Codeberg is organized as "eingetragener Verein" and here you have the basis for what is considered free: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....
Folks, this is politics, this is power struggle, this is what Germans call "Grabenkämpfe". If you aren't used to the lifestyle, you won't understand nor enjoy the ride.
I build an extremely successfully eV myself which still lives and thrives for 30 years now - without me.
Value GitHub, stay away from European "alternatives". They aren't.
https://archive.is/FfZ8x
(Site's down for me)
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.
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
I think their humans are reviewing the repositories that are created. This is probably strange to Americans accustomed to everything being an automated process at a faceless corporation.
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?
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.
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 threw my lot in with Forgejo. After the fork, most of the maintainers went along with it.
In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.
(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
This is the german way, rule by setting the rules.
The CSS-powered blink tag at the end is like a flashbang from the late 90s
I agree 100% with Codeberg.
On tab change dynamic title update is crazy xD
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?
Not really. See https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-pri...
Sorry, but I do not understand. Can I host a repo publicly at least while it is still in initial development stages? For example, I have two repos that have been in development for more than 2 years. I intend to show case them and continue them as open source, but I will probably be the only user for a while. These two predate AI/LLM advancements, and I am pretty anti-AI for non-professional use cases. As someone put it, it is single-user open source repo with low or zero users, and have low commits, and are well below any storage limits.
Yes, unless it's obviously something that is only ever usable by you. If they did remove it for some reason anyway, they would contact you first because it isn't spam.
Sure, i linked the docs about private repos specifically. Public repositories of FLOSS are the mission of codeberg, minus slopware and shitcoins (the subject of this thread). I thought the FAQ was pretty clear about that, but if that's not the case, i guess PRs are welcome to improve it.
Exactly what you would expect from a German non-profit.
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.
To test the limits of the very policy we’re discussing?
In other words, to attack Codeberg
Install Forgejo and move on...
Jim Goad wrote about this. His target was the Bay Area crowd, but Berlin is the same:
„ Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.
You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.“
https://www.jimgoad.net/bayaryan.html
This would be something you'd post if you held opinions that were subject to severe social disapproval.
> 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".
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.
I'm banned from Bluesky, how do I fix it?
Host your own PDS, use an alternative relay and App Server, like Blacksky.
I'm not black.
I don't know why you think this matters, you're not blue either.
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?
No it wouldn't, because each Mastodon server can choose who to federate with and many servers don't federate openly or don't federate with smaller hosts for technical, scaling, or even political reasons.
I've done it, self hosted Mastodon limited my ability to participate in the social network in a way that it does not on ATProto.
Also you can't port between instances. Whereas this is fundamental to the ATProto ecosystem.
Yes.
My understanding of ATProto is that it essentially means an open database. As a consequence anybody can write an alternative interfaces for any data.
The argument is that with ActivityPub does not care about that aspect. With Mastodon, the database is under the control of whoever owns the server.
The rebuilding part is rather similar, but exporting the data is trivial with ATProto but depends on the admin with ActivityPub.
I don't see why anyone is shocked that people would want to build a community that keeps out vibe coders and crypto bros. There are plenty of options, who cares?
> 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.
> 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".
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".
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.
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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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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.
Do share your strategy for stealing from bitcoin millionaires, for entertainment.
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.
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“At least I’m not getting shot” isn’t much of an argument.
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.
Why did you think they wanted everyone to go all-in? They have always been opinionated.
I'm guessing the
>sh.tcoin
in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though
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.
Software has always been political. From the big P political when PGP was banned from export from the US in the 90s, to the small p political where you can fix the software running on your own machine (akin to filling in the potholes on main street).
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?"
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.
No, I don't find it ridiculous:
1. You are not entitled to a website hosting your content. A website refusing to host you is not censorship in any form whatsoever.
2. I'm pretty positive they did this because of infrastructure reasons as a secondary reason to their mission. LLMs mean people can just pump out projects at light speed, and that costs money to both host and do things with on CI/CD. If you want that potentially to be lifted in the future, pay them so they are able to have that infrastructure.
Just ask your AI to set up a website called Vibeberg for AI projects only. It should be really simple.
It has nothing to do with "vibe coding" in the sense you imply, you see the ARC-AGI, DeepSWE benchmarks and so-on, assume that will be 99.9% soon when we have Opus 9 which will be soon, which means in practice that most SWE are beaten by top models, which means that letting humans code will be more dangerous (and inferior) than letting models code, we are already close to that which is why we must change the way we work now, not the moment it comes.
It's already dangerous today to not review codebases by top models, how do you think that will be in 2028?
And yes, a simple combination of top models today in adversarial+loops... and only 20 subscriptions will do much better than Codeberg ($100K monthly token equivalent).
But sure, Codeberg can remain alive for all the legacy stuff, but imo the mentality is quite backward.
This comment is full of both a lot of hyperbole and theoretical outcomes that Idk even where to begin. There for one is no guarantee that Anthropic will remain around long enough for them to get to Opus 9 let alone a better model for one. The same could be said for OAI.
And again, what is the problem with a platform wanting to not be flooded with a bunch of low-quality code that gets abandoned after it's done what the creator wanted it to do? I keep seeing this claim of these models being better than "most" developers but have yet to see any actual statistics cited to back up this claim which makes me think it's all just vibes.
It's not low-quality code, that's the thing, yes, you can do trash, like most humans do, but it can also output better code, consistency... than most humans today, what will it be next year?
Anthropic isn't going away, even if they do, a lot will compete anyway, AI in a general sense will reach the point where our jobs as dev will be to prompt all day long and that's it. It's almost sure that we will keep having better models and tooling, right now every single month it's getting better and better, and on some aspects not just linearly.
the moment GPT-3.5 dropped, it was already not hard to picture literally what we do today, the "hmm what if THIS suddenly is actually accurate", and tomorrow, it will be all the pain points we currently have that are solved.
Genuinely, see the Bun porting? Imagine that is with a very "weak" model, weak tooling, weak hardware, now imagine that tomorrow, it will port it 50x faster, more performant, better consistency, docs, and virtually zero bugs: not hard to picture at all, it's what it will be imo in 1 year, 2 tops just if the current pace continue, that's not even accounting for the thousand of new companies coming, can we really say it's vibe trash when it outperforms humans?
Think of what's slowing you down today and why you aren't already a Bot typing non-stop and imagine those solved, now what?
I must add Kimi K3 as another example, nothing "wahou" with it in the sense that it was already a sure thing, it's so great to see it coming already, but it's also sure we will have Mythos 10 level open-source, open-weight in a few years, it won't be surprising I mean, it's just logical. We will also have Marvel-level movies done with a prompt.
PS: sorry it's all over the place and out of touch with the initial Codeberg thing
Just start up Vibeberg and forget about Codeberg entirely. It's obsolete, an ancient relic. Vibe ahead!
We've already forgotten about Codeberg since the announcement, done, vibed :)
And did you ask your AI to make Vibeberg? If not, why not?