Comment by anticorporate
5 days ago
The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
I don't share that concern.
It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources. Personally, I have a group of friends who share a GitLab instance, for example. Are you allowed to use it? No. Why? Because I didn't go to middle school with you decades ago. Is that fair? I don't really find that question relevant. I also keep a Gitea instance running at home for all the junk that really doesn't belong on someone else's hardware. Using someone else's forge isn't the only option.
> It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources. Personally, I have a group of friends who share a GitLab instance, for example.
I think it's a bad example since your private GitLab instance wasn't all over the HN earlier screaming "are you tired of Github outages and Microslop breaking it every day? Migrate all your shit to Codeberg, the good guys of the internet" only to later pull the rug like this.
Private stuff is cool and there's place for it. Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative and it's currently failing miserably at this.
I swear HN has some sort of Mandela effect about Codeberg's mission. Their website clearly states they're a community-led non-profit that hosts like-minded FOSS projects, and their FAQ directly asks you to host private repos somewhere else.
Yet the amount of comments in this site proposing them as a GitHub alternative for individuals and companies, and suggesting them to move their repos there is absurd, and not enough people correct them.
Do yourself a favor and look at the actual HN thread [1] when Codeberg was widely discussed for the first time. It is crystal clear that Codeberg was seen as a direct alternative to GitHub at that time, and even the founder's quoted statement gave a nod to that I think?
> [...] But as developers of free software we fell into a trap – we poured invaluable source code, documentation and last not least a huge and steady stream of data about our personalities, interests and social networks into proprietary platforms. [...]
(And no one knew Codeberg had a right to determine which source code and documentation is invaluable.)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930
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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.
>> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
> What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
Codeberg's getting started documentation has the line, "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." [1]
[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/
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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.
> ... Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
[0] <https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up>
[1] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/PrivacyPolicy.md>
[2] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/TermsOfUse.md>
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> I didn't look into codeberg really
So, politely, why are you posting?
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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.
Many influential F/OSS projects started with a small number of users (and contributors), and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Codeberg effectively says that it only welcome mature enough projects that it feels worthy to host, and that's selfish. That's not a direct problem by itself but still a good reason to get criticized.
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Another practical application would have been if they would have charged for CI - by the minutes - for projects with no user or contributor community.
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Uh, I thunk you’re underestimating the community around most of those. BDFL doesn’t mean single-contributor.
No all of these examples have historically been single contributor
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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.
Codeberg market themselves as not just a host but a community, so mass banning projects that didn't do anything wrong and were previously operating within the rules feels more like rejection from a community rather than a business decision made of necessity, especially the way the decision came about via some quasi-democratic process.
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Codeberg is a German e.V. claiming significant benefits from society, including tax-free status.
The argument “they can do whatever they want” doesn’t hold water. They are using legal privileges that other institutions don’t have, based on the assumption that they operate for the public benefit. I’m not saying that their current rules automatically mean they don’t live up to that claim, but it’s certainly worth a discussion.
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It's absolutely Codeberg's right to do this, but I only wish that they had been more clear about this earlier, because now I have to move all my repos to my own forge.
I also do consider it to be extremely disappointing that my FOSS projects under approved licences are not welcome because they don't have a community, even if they are taking only hundreds of kilobytes of disk space and bandwidth.
Codeberg's website currently says it hosts "650198 projects". How many of those are solo programmers or projects without a significant community? I suspect if they were to enforce their policy they would only have several hundred projects on the platform in total. That being said, I'm not taking chances that my repos might be nuked at any time so I have no choice but to move.
I do not believe they will kick off a serious project that only uses hundreds of kilobytes just because it isn't big yet. I believe they are saying they don't want things like dotfiles repos (unless many people are using your dotfiles) or one-off scripts. The rules are not for interpretation by a computer program - they are a BDFL trying to communicate what he likes and doesn't like.
Funnily enough, my dotfiles were actually one of the things I was storing on Codeberg! Still, it's Codeberg's platform and it's their choice, but I absolutely will not host my repos on a platform whose BDFL can wake up and decide they're not welcome. At least I can sleep mostly peacefully hosting these things on my own forge.
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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.
My current understanding is it's fine if you are trying to build something serious but it isn't there yet. They don't want to host your internal tools, one-off scripts or dotfiles that aren't useful to anyone but you.
That thread is fascinating, to say the least.
It really highlights why I have avoided Mastodon entirely.
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This quote really sticks out (it's arguing against sticking with free software's core principles):
> bwahahahahahaha are u gonna preach “no politics” now too. free software is inherently dogmatic, screw playing centrist
Thanks for linking that thread, it told me everything I needed to know.
Are these the people "controlling" it or just an adjacent channel (which excepted a few pinko CCC type people like the OP seems reasonable)?
Anyway, if the earlier https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha... didn't inform you concerning the kind of people running the show, I don't know what to tell you...
I agree with this and I think it's the right way to think about it. They have the right to create their community as they want to. No one is forced to use them.
If a gitea instance only wants to offer free hosting only for rust projects, that's their right. I think the problem here is that codeberg was seen as a GitHub replacement and people were expecting the same openness, even if it was restricted only to open source projects.
> The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
And the author is wrong. Nothing in the ban on heavy LLM-assisted projects + crypto and the subsequent blog post[0] is suggesting that Codeberg is against solo projects without community.
If you read the post[0] carefully and not using AI-summaries or assuming context from HN/Reddit/X comments you'll see that they are calling out specifically projects that overuse resources that are meant to be equally shared. For projects with large communities, that is expected, but solo projects with zero effective users spinning CI 20 hours a day and uploading many hundreds megabytes of code daily is just plain being an asshole.
When AI bros see words "free", they usually respond with "all for me?". But that's not how that works in most places, or atleast it's not sustainable.
Also note that Codeberg specifically said that while it's against terms, they are not going to scan for LLM-written code or pressure people to delete their small, low-resource-using repos.
[0] - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...