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.
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.
>> 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.
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).
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 :)
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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://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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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. :)
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?
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.
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.
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.
You gave up because the anti JavaScript position is completely insane and unreasonable?
The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.
The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.
I thought it was funny at first and kept clicking away to see what other random changes I'd get, but then I got a "Zuckerberg nudes" Google search webpage and I'm on my work computer...
Fortunately this functionality doesn't change your browser history, but it did really annoy me for a bit
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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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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 :)
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I think German non profit organizations are required by law to have a certain level of governance structure.
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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
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> 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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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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
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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
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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...
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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Uh, I thunk you’re underestimating the community around most of those. BDFL doesn’t mean single-contributor.
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> 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.
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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.
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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://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.
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That thread is fascinating, to say the least.
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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?
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> 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.
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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.
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Using RMS as an example of "how to not be political" is uh... interesting.
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"nice things" you mean upholding the harm of the status quo by not criticizing it
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Firefox is an interesting choice as a company that wasn’t affected by identity politics given how Brendan Eich left the company
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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.
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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. :)
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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.
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I thought this was supposed to be a site for hackers? Apply some Hacker Nature to the problem.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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> 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.
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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.
> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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).
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.
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.
Think this convinced me to move over.
Curious about what in the article convinced you.
Same here, I might actually migrate.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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 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.
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?
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.
This is the german way, rule by setting the rules.
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
On tab change dynamic title update is crazy xD
The CSS-powered blink tag at the end is like a flashbang from the late 90s
I agree 100% with Codeberg.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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