Comment by aliasxneo
4 days ago
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.
So it sounds like you're treating Codeberg as a neutral git host. They've made it clear they don't want to be that, they are a charity association that supports free software development by providing free software developers with services like git hosting. They are not wasting their services on people who don't align with the mission.
That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed.
And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be.
Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.
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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.
I really don't understand the argument, to be honest. If somebody is participating in something with a perceived expectation, and then that expectation gets contradicted not once, but twice, why is it unreasonable to assume it might happen again? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely don't understand the line of thinking.
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If you consider the argument of the comment at the top, that those who disagree with banning will leave. It would seem that you could expect an acceleration.
I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands.
No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.
They won't. No company will, I think the best quote I've heard this week is from the proton CEO on the Decoder podcast.
"No company is going to jail for you."
If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.
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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.)
My read of the "side projects and experiments" part of the blog post is that, in the context of LLM projects, if your project does not use resources and isn't looking to attract a community then, if only due to the practicalities of moderation/enforcement, they're unlikely to take any action against it because it won't be visible or causing enough problems.
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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.
> "Did it get much attention?
4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
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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?
It does exists for any bank. Where I'm at, the assurance is given by the national bank, not the individual banks. Anything else is just probability and marketing.
In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.
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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.
The point is that the stated values of said group changed.
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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.
What is and isn't illegal is the very definition of political
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