Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
codeberg.org
codeberg.org
> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?
It looks like we need more alternatives...
A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.
Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.
Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.
Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.
Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.
Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter. It just doesn't matter.
Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so
It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).
Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.
It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.
Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.
My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.
Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.
Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.
No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.
Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”
EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...
What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.
Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.
What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?
No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.
Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.
But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.
To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).
They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..
https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use
Mostly positive HN discussion when this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403780
Rightly or wrongly, Codeberg had a different feel. For a while it felt like it was trying to be a refuge from Github. But then again, maybe that was projecting something on them that they didn't intend.
The entire point of Forgejo, the git forge that Codeberg runs on as well, is that you can run your own very easily. I've stopped having private repos on Github completely in favor of my own Forgejo instance, and it's way smoother and nicer. Codeberg was never meant for private repos, but if I get around to starting a new floss project that I want to put out there, Codeberg would be a great option!
And sure, right now there is no cross-forge collaboration, so you need to have multiple accounts. But forge federation is planned, eventually you should be able to contribute to your friend's project from your instance. If you don't wanna wait, go look at https://tangled.org/ or something.
Assuming that people that use blockchains are not principled is similar to assuming that people that use arrays are not principled.
Maybe more ridiculous, as you're supporting banks, card companies, and money transfer providers taking 1-6% of everyone's transactions.
I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
They do not believe this because this is simply not the reality we live in
> Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
They are correct in this view. No matter how "apolitical" platforms like Github and various maintainers of open source projects pretend to be, the reality is that creating, hosting and distributing code is highly political and should be treated as such.
They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.
They are voluntarily choosing to be a publisher. Publishers are responsible for the actions that the users do on their platform.
States are happier with and want more publishers as it's easier to censor, add surveillance and control them than neutral platforms.
The few past times when Cloudfare censored politically was interesting as they quickly made apologies because they want to be seen more as a neutral platform than a service that nation states can control.
It's why modern internet legislation across all parties and across all nations is geared towards changing platforms into publishers.
And it's why the services that we would have seen to be independent and neutral in the past are choosing this new paradigm.
The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.
The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.
Saying "no crypto" has a wide range of impact, from pushing away crypto projects, to pushing away businesses who see it as an overreach, to pushing away free speech advocates.
I know which one I'll be sticking with.
Reddit bans abuse (defined as not uploading an ID photo), is that fine?
[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/
Sovereign personal infrastructure is amazing. Highly recommended. Dealing with the government's rules and their politics is obnoxious enough. I'm starting to really lose patience with all of these communities.
A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.
(I also mirror projects to public GitLab and to GitHub.)
https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/
Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.
Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.
This can be contrasted with a private company, which will often have a "activist investor", the actual owner!
So it's totally fine to poke fun, and totally fine for them to do whatever they want. We aren't part of that community!
The larger body of users who don't want to be bothered are likely welcome, but there are rules to be followed.
They can go elsewhere you know? I mean, it's not like they are paying for anything.
They state "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."
It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".
codeberg has outed themselves as an unserious undertaking. they will not be known for anything else now.
This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.
Making the proposal fit all the nuances would no doubt be a nightmare in an association structure with so many members distributed around the world, we've had 6h+ long meetings for deciding on wording of a controversial policy in our e.V., and that was with everyone involved in the same room.
Codeberg may simply not be the right forge for many projects, which is probably fine, but does leave a gap for a good non-big-tech forge alternative (tangled isn't a good alternative, fwiw).
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...
Are they though? I see "We are more than just Git hosting: Our community is ..." right in the highlight box on their landing page.
They are not trying to run an inclusive service.
Cryptocurrency doesn’t have a lot of use cases outside of money laundering, avoiding sanctions and stealing money through rug pulls.
Codeberg seems to disagree about that point.
They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.
Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.
I have small open source projects that I won't move to Codeberg ever now because I don't want to waste any mental energy pondering if I might get banned in the future.
For example I have a stock trading backtracking strategy test tool. Will they ban anything related to fintech in the future because it is deemed evil? I don't want to have to think about that.
Will they ban my crappy game macroing tool to automate some simple repetitive game actions because it is considered cheating or against some game ToS? I don't care and I don't want to have to care about a possible ban. It's a glorified auto clicker to prevent RSI health issues ffs.
If you're not interested in stuff like that when your company is doing it, but are up in arms about some other platform deciding that they don't like crypto, I think you should look in the mirror. Their reasoning is probably the same: they don't like it and don't want to put up with the task of sensibly policing the category.
Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.
Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power
(KF got banned from Cloudflare, then had a lot of trouble finding an ISP, eventually made their own, and then had trouble finding upstreams. You might wonder what they did that was so bad but not illegal - that's a long story.)
It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.
I suppose since Codeberg is a totally free non-profit for OSS projects, it makes it more reasonable for them to ban code for idealogical differences (as opposed to legal).
But if it were a paid service, this would not inspire confidence that it's a place to host my company's code.
[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...
Codeberg and others setting their own rules (especially if it's done via a community vote and not a decision by some random exec who's just heard a buzzword and now forces everyone to immediately adopt it) is actually a desirable outcome -- given that Forgejo or any other GitLab is open source, so you can (and somebody probably will) create more "hubs". This avoids lock-in by a single "hub" and hopefully will lead to more standartisation and cooperation instead of what we have now with a single largest hub like GitHub.
There are some levels of censorship that make sense for a code forge - “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”, etc. But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software sends the message that this isn’t a safe place to host any of your repositories. If the moral landscape shifts in the future, how can you be sure your project won’t be next on the chopping block?
What a terrible precedent to set.
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion.
Where terms and conditions are concerned I really do value "easy answers".
> 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 really don't want to join a commons where something I make might be "tolerated in practice" based on a given moderator's vibe. Which I suppose is the message I was meant to receive from the issue that passed the vote.
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
[1] https://blog.okturtles.org/2024/06/the-ultimate-ios-to-graph...
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
But I tried clicking on the link cited in the OP that would explain this ( https://forum.codeberg.org/d/82-taking-a-stance-against-cryp... ) and it got 404.
And getting a 404 on a host that's supposed to host code, now that is completely unacceptable and makes you want to stay far away indeed.
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
Except that here is no censorship to be seen.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh
This incident coupled with the Forgejo one (In which they twisted the whole story and made Gitea look like the biggest villain in FOSS when in fact they orchestrated the whole drama by submitting a controversial PR that many people don't know about) made me quit and keep away from their hosting.
But I think they got this particular political decision wrong, both ethically and factually. Looking at what seems to have passed for "deliberation", it's hard not to walk away with a very poor impression of codeberg (or at least, their process for deciding on such bans).
The crux of the argument appears to have been that blockchains are environmentally destructive - obviously a critique aimed at Proof-of-Work blockchains. Then, many commenters pointed out that the environmental argument doesn't apply to proof-of-stake projects in the same way.
The responses then become just inane and immature. For example, "The dominant cryptocurrency is still Bitcoin and they have no plans to move to Proof-of-stake." - I can't fathom how this statement has any bearing on the impact of other proof-of-stake projects using codeberg as their VCS host.
Through these issue threads leading up to the vote, the arguments in favor of continuing to host blockchain projects are far more reasonable and sober and better informed than the detractors.
If anything, this discussion seems to reinforce the (and my) view that, on long time scales, blockchains are likely to be an elegant solution to humanity's problems of economic inequality and inefficiency.
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.
"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.
No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.
A quality filter would have been more effective.
Honestly, I think this measure actually gives Codeberg a competitive edge in terms of code quality.
I think we're now seeing a pattern where, under a 'free' large market, regulations are being used to create unique market identities. That's my take—it depends on what you regulate, which determines the market's character.
Personally, I've noticed that when Codeberg announced regulations around AI code, most of the comments cheered. But when the same people talk about cryptocurrency regulations, they get angry. It seems like people just want to regulate what they don't like, not what they do.
I won't use Codeberg myself, but I think this policy is reasonable. I've decided that what you regulate defines your market's identity.
If you don't see the politics behind economic actors, i would recommend taking a closer look.
Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.
Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.
We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.
But this (and especially the AI ban) is a big red flag and I'm steering clear from Codeberg.
A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.
More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.
> “ Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”
Github still works, and the crypto ecosystem also has arweave and many others for static assets
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
Are you sure you don't feel insulted and threatened because you're yourself a sloperator, so it feels personal to have others criticize your practices from a moral standpoint? (i don't know, i haven't researched your profile)
Codeberg bans vibe coded projects
Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260723015826/https://codeberg....
Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/
On the one hand its there site so they can do what they want and tbh its pretty easy to self host your own git server nowdays (which i do) however the issue i do have with this and really its a wider issue i have with the industry as whole:
I feel like we focus way to much ideology's and moral grandstanding which we then insert that into tech projects so seeing stuff like this makes we want to avoid using this site with a 10 foot pole. Can we just focus on tech not some moral grandstanding about politics, crypto blah blah but i guess thats too hard of a thing to ask or something
Please dont. I posted this here to spark a discussion on HN, not as a license to raid Codeberg. They're at liberty to set their own policies in the same way I'm at liberty to not use their services.
If you want to discuss this and you're not already an account holder at Codeberg, the comments section is right here.
To me that means that there will be less moderation than on Codeberg, the "Mastodon version of GitHub"
1. that LLMs actually improve project quality, which may be true for projects with very clear style guides and test suites (eg. the linux kernel) but may also be false for 99% of projects (are the LLM tests testing good behavior or just random stuff?)
2. that codeberg's orientation is to host code for private businesses (it's a non-profit in which businesses may take part, but that's definitely not the target audience)
Also commercial activity tends to happen when everyone involved in the activity comes out ahead, so placing it as opposed to "net good" is perhaps a bit dubious.
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
Now it's this.
I want my code hosting to host my code and only consider removing something when there's a legal demand from authorities.
Otherwise you can't be sure that the code you host peacefully today won't fall out of political activists favor tomorrow and be deleted forcing you to scramble figuring out where to move to. Fuck this.
Then again, Codeberg as a project can do whatever they want. I'm just happy that anyone can host Gitea, Gogs, GitBucket or GitLab or whatever they wnat. For my personal stuff Gitea works really nice with Woodpecker CI.
I'm sure many other hosted platforms don't have such stringent rules, though.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.
But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.
I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.
Self-hosting classic forge is great but does require domain name and infra with uptime. These p2p solutions are more like bittorrent where you can clone as long as someone is seeding and git already has commit signature as building block for trust.
You can disagree with the decision here. That's a reasonable debate. Pretending it's about "pluralism" or "tyranny" is pathetic.
Think about it for half a second: do you think every platform that accepts user content is required to accept all not-explicitly-illegal content? No? Then the only question is where to set the line. Codeberg is making their own choices. If you don't like those choices, I don't even have to tell you to start your own platform, because there's already tons of competition.
I'm not surprised many here are upset. Many here don't seem to understand the outrageous harms that a totally out-of-control tech industry has been foisting upon the planet. It's time to take a stand for a better path forward.
all the harms come from for-profit companies that use crypto as a cover, like polymarket or stake. the contracts are on chain and might be open licensed but one company controls everything in practice with admin rights. and they make it hard to access directly without going through the proprietary frontend hosted on their servers.
the only ones who would ever want to host their code on codeberg are real community projects, because the corpos are all happy with github.