Comment by amiga386
2 days ago
> Where did we get this idea that federated instances should never block anything?
I'm not sure, but the OP was postulating that Forgejo instances could federate to solve the problem that the Dutch government runs its own instance to develop its software (including using AI extensively) but wants to engage with the wider community so is currently hosting things on Codeberg's centralised instance of Forgejo, and Codeberg's administrators hate AI.
Adding federation doesn't solve that problem, it just moves it one level up. To collaborate with the Dutch government, you either need to directly register on their site, or set up an entire copy of Forgejo, publicly hosted, so you can federate your one-user instance with them, or you need to find a different instance that someone else hosts, and be at the mercy of that instance's admins, who may be even more cruel and capricious than Codeberg's.
What I predict is a future codeberg.org/about saying
code.overheid.nl Suspended (slopfondlers)
And a future code.overheid.nl/about being full of dodgy Forgejo instances that host porn games
Codeberg's AI position was about resource waste. Single-user AI projects were spamming their CI/CD as if they were KDE or the kernel.
They don't care if someone wastes their own resources.
Federation is a people-problem, not so much the resource problem.
Mastodon servers defederate because the people (or rather, the admins, perhaps prompted by the users) of instance A don't want anything to do with the people (who toot at the discretion and policies of the admins) of instance B.
Codeberg's AI position, as stated and voted upon, does not mention resource usage at all. That's completely invisible from the discussion. It is exclusively argued against on accord of 1) unclear copyright ownership, and 2) users have no idea what's in the code, therefore it could be full of security flaws or harmful code.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253
So they would not want to federate with another instance that used a lot of AI-generated code, even if it claimed an open license, even if that federation caused little-to-no usage of their CI. They would fundamentally disagree with any other instance that allowed mostly-AI-generated projects. They would therefore block such instances, if federation was a thing.
Those are all problems codeberg doesn't want on its system. Allowing a codeberg user to comment on someone else's system wouldn't bring those problems to codeberg.