Comment by free_bip
4 days ago
I think this move by Codeberg is lowkey genius. They're trying to build a community based on a set of shared values. Those who disagree with those values are now self-selecting out of the Codeberg community, which is exactly the point of passing these kinds of resolutions.
The fact that the rule is open for interpretation means that they can effectively shut down malicious actors (i.e those who intentionally misrepresent the degree of AI assistance in writing their code) before they become a problem. It becomes an exercise in judgement instead of a potentially exploitable/loophole-able set of hard and fast rules.
There's no issue with this. This isn't the supreme court. Your income is not on the line. It's a code hosting repository. Go to GitHub if it bothers you.
Only time will tell if this set of values holds up. Personally, I think they will, and that the rules will end up being less strict than people are making them out to be, and that relatively few projects will be removed from the platform.
I’ve seen so many variations of this where a community starts adding more rules that are open to judgment.
Removing the obvious rule breakers looks like an easy win at first. Then over time the list of rules grows. Small groups become good at navigating the rule making process and getting changes pushed through. Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors. The community was long since cleared out from anyone who got sick of the drama, leaving a weird internal battle where different in groups are fighting with each other over little things and turning the rules against each other.
Maybe Codeberg will be different. Maybe the rule making stops here and it’s reasonably enforced against only the really bad examples, with leeway granted to others generously. Maybe it doesn’t turn into a slippery slope of little dramas that exhaust everyone who isn’t invested in the constant background drama of their code hosting site. I hope it does for their sake.
But I also think enough people like me have seen what happens to communities that go down the path of generating a lot of rules like these and will choose to steer clear of this site. It always feels like a good idea when you and all your friends are on the right side of the rules, but it’s less fun when you find yourself making choices or tip toeing around to avoid triggering the Nth round of rules that were introduced 10 steps past where you thought the rules were in a good and balanced place.
>Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors.
Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.
Importantly, Wikipedia's policy is a bit more detailed about what LLM contributions are and aren't allowed. There is always ambiguity, but going through specific cases and examples up front in the policy went a long way.
How do you propose the people who want a shared space where they can know that there is no slop/crypto crap approach it?
Perhaps something akin to a tag? E.g. if memory safe purists were popular on codeberg I'd hope there was just a way to filter projects by that feature (or at least by language) rather than the C projects get kicked out and we end up with 50 platforms for the 50 communities of coding opinions.
Not to mention what happens when these rules cease to be rules on purely technical matters. What if they make a rule against the site allowing hosting the code *of* AI agents for example?
Codeberg did make such a rule. Their announcement explicitly says that "Projects heavily tied to the LLM ecosytem" are "no longer [...] welcome on Codeberg". The code for an AI agent would definitely fall into that category.
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Then you have your agent create you your own codeberg, with blackjack, and hookers.
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I've been thinking along these lines more and more. Trying to specify exact limits and trying to account for every possible situation when making rules just encourages people to find holes and workarounds. It creates a game, a competition between the rule makers and everyone else.
When instead you state higher level values and ask for cooperation, it encourages us to work together. It's the Honor System instead of a deliberate competition between rule makers and everyone else.
Concrete example: sports
When you are playing with a group of friends and there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules. It's not perfect, but it works for the most part because we all love the game and want to have a good time.
Once you introduce referees, the game within the game of "what can I get away with?" starts and you end up with players learning how to foul without getting caught and then players overreacting to fouls in order to make sure the rule breakers still get caught, and then it evolves into flopping to get a foul called even when there was none, and eventually people start to hate the sport altogether (see: NBA, FIFA)
Concrete example: government and police forces. Do I even need to elaborate on this one?
That's actually how EU law works! I think it's also why US companies keep getting in trouble here, they try to loophole-lawyer like at home, but it just... doesn't work that way.
I had a whole long conversation about this with another commenter a while ago if you're interested in learning more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48707697
Very interesting discussion, thanks for sharing that.
India has a different system where generally speaking, it behaves more like UK/US courts (common law) over civil law.
But if Supreme Court reads fundamental rights are violated then Supreme Court can read the constitution in a similar way but Supreme Court has used it sometimes to force the government hands.
For example, when the Bhopal Gas tragedy happened where people died because of the accident (Rest in peace), instead of having individual people try to sue the govt. and fight for years with no end in sight, the supreme court used article 142 to impose single lump sum settlement and centralized compensation scheme. So it can force a govt to do something.
The Sahara-SEBI Case is even more direct when supreme court forced a company to refund amount and fast-tracked it in a more civil-law style case.
But Indian Supreme court is very slow and from my understanding, does try to use it rarely and only the Indian Supreme court can invoke article 142 and its more so done to prevent genuine gaps rather than already existing provisions
I found this whole discussion really interesting
In theory this split between common law and civil law is about who you trust more: judiciary or legislature. Civil law leaves more to interpretation for judiciary whereas common law leaves very little to interpretation. There doesn't seem to be very wide consensus on which system is necessarily better to be honest.
> there's no referee, most everyone does their best to just play hard and follow the rules
Only in small groups. Any sufficiently large groups will have a number of people (possibly sociopaths) that will break the rules for personal gain. And in a lot of cases it's enough if very few people do that.
That's right, and that's when the rest of the people say "we're kicking you out", and if the offender says "but why" everyone say "because you broke the rules" and if the offender tries to rules-lawyer everyone says "it doesn't matter, we're kicking you out because we believe you are not playing by the rules".
That's where gatekeeping comes in.
This is a lesson I learned in life: When you want to build something social (in this case a community, but it could also be a romantic relationship, a friendship...), the best thing you can do is to polarize as quickly as possible.
Too many people are afraid to offend and waste everyone's time going along with things they don't really agree with and end up pretending to be somebody they're not to get along with people they don't really like.
No! Get your most polarizing takes out quickly. Either you and the other person stop wasting time because there's no fit, or you will deepen the relationship and both know it's a good fit. Either way, it's better for everyone involved.
There's enough people out in this big world that you don't need to always make everyone happy. It's much better to quickly comb through to find the gems.
Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.
You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.
Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable?
Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules?
If not one of the two, what is the reason?
The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.
Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened.
This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.
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I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.
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Honestly, for me, both.
While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).
But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.
Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.
And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.
(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
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Is it not obvious? They've just done it. They've excluded people based on new rules, and not everybody was expecting those new rules.
Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that?
I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote:
> The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?
Did it get much attention? I don't know of a single person who finds value in LLM generated comments on social platforms. The fact that Codeberg is getting attention for this move is likely because it alienated a part of the community that was previously engaging, enough to generate constructive responses. I didn't see the same thing happening with this HN change.
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> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow
This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.
Yes, and the baseline amount of trust seems to be substantially reduced for Codeberg for a lot of people in the wake of this change relative to most of the other options. I don't even necessarily think the new policy is bad in a vacuum, but if the strongest argument for why you can trust a service is "well can you really trust anyone 100%?", it's hard not to be a little wary.
Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?
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What "shadow group" would that be? The paying members of Codeberg e.V. who voted to pass this motion?
And also like... this is how literally any community works? You "invest your free time" in it, then you do something that goes against the values of that community... yeah, of course that big bad "shadow group" (in other words, the admins/moderators) is going to do something.
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1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it.
2. Slippery slope fallacy.
3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2
Did you know GitHub removes things they deem to be malware? Malware is a very subjective classification, so who watches the watchmen? How do we know they won't start removing things that are deemed harmful just for competing with Microsoft products? Hell, letting them have a mechanism to moderate the site's content at all is a huge risk to society's freedom and continued existence. Aliens could arrive any time and shoot mind control beams at the GitHub admins which compel them to delete everything at once. The only way to prevent the future holocaust is if I'm allowed to typo squat GitHub repos to distribute viruses and someone else has to pay for it. If it's not safe for me to do that, GitHub is not safe for anyone.
Removing malware or illegal content is very different than removing things for political reasons.
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The goal is to reduce the amount of use of the platform, and I think imposing this rule is an excellent way to do that. Not sure I'd call it genius, though. There's a fair likelihood of unintended consequences.
these things always end with community disintegration. Eventually, some high profile user will cross the undefined line or leaders change and want to rewrite the rule then half the community will side with them and half will not.
Yes, every community disintegrates. Eventually. Individuals also disintegrate. Over the long run, planets and stars disintegrate. Best not to think about it too much lest you go insane.
I think we should point out that Codeberg is a e.V. and that they have a Mission Statement [1]
> The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process.
[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...
As I understand it, they do not ban Crypto. Crypto is just an example for a category of projects that harm there reputation. The formulation for AI generated code is different. It does not point out AI / LLMs as example for copyright issues. It does it the other way around.
Seems like a recipe for endless division and meta arguments rather than doing anything useful.
Reminds me of internal political disagreements.
> There's no issue with this. This isn't the supreme court. Your income is not on the line. It's a code hosting repository. Go to GitHub if it bothers you.
Codeberg is best known as a place for people to go when they're fed up with GitHub. People who are fine with GitHub's various issues wouldn't be looking at Codeberg in the first place, as far as I can tell.
There is GitLab, though. And Forgejo and a bunch of others.
The big thing I read is Codeberg is for community projects explicitly now, not just your random non-commercial code.
Personal use cases are now “might go unnoticed” and therefore not encouraged. Jeff’s dotfiles repo will probably never have a community, so it’s technically against the rules for some future cleanup initiative.
Most of my repos are random personal projects that are not supporting any larger open source thing, so I couldn’t look at (or recommend Codeberg) as a GitHub alternative for anything but an established project.
I think that’s all an acceptable choice, but it’s not being discussed much.
> The fact that the rule is open for interpretation means that they can effectively shut down malicious actors
This also mean that some kind of charismatic leader can become a de-facto tyrant.
And btw, lone leader on top, bending the rules at will… that’s a trait all dictatorships have in common (hitler, mussolini, stalin, mao, etc). Just saying.
Ans that's why I don't use Python or Linux.
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That doesn't seem like a great take on this. You seem to be implying that only unemployed people choose not to use AI, and anything that doesn't use AI is a useless toy project.
There were decades of software written before modern LLMs, and a lot of people choose to hand write their software as a form of maintaining their skill. Just like people practice martial arts even though we have guns.
If you reflect on your words, you might see another side to this.
> Just like people practice martial arts even though we have guns.
The whole point of martial arts is the art itself.
The point of software isn't the process of creating software (it was never about that), it's the end result, and all people care about is that the end result is good. And if you don't like that, you can choose another industry.
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Yes, that's exactly it. Now please go back to your githubs and leave us nerds who do not matter alone. We'll be fine, we promise!
1. Random dude self-hosts a Git instance
2. Gets mad that people he doesn't like DARE to sign up and use it
3. Announces that he won't allow people he doesn't like
4. Makes a big deal out of it like anyone cares
I dunno this is hilarious but pretty sad, the guy clearly has issues
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It's balkanization! We'll be Montenegro, you can have Moldova.
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Funny enough if you read their blogpost on this, they don't want people with useless toy projects, they want projects with communities...(subtext: to leech off of).
That blog post while on the LLM topic also started throwing the OSS bathwater out and went straight-on leech mode in between the lines.