I regret migrating to Codeberg
xn--gckvb8fzb.com
xn--gckvb8fzb.com
It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue.
It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"
Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix
The original reply that closes the issue is this:
> This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org
Make of the room topic what you will.
Was that actually the subject of the email? If so that's nuts.
> Subject: New poll on polls.codeberg.org
> A new poll has been created on polls.codeberg.org:
> Poll Question:
> Disallow vibe-coded projects (Terms of Use amendment) Do you agree to the changes from the Pull Request https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files being accepted?
> Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://...
> This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file.
> [some more info about how to use your token]
The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me.
But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer
We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
For more complex software, so far it has been my experience that you get more predictable behavior (fewer edge-cases), performance, and relevant (but, to be fair, less comprehensive) documentation when someone thought about and built it
I fully agree that a well-written human application can be far better organized and documented. But I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on, but rather the bottom 90% that get far fewer eyes and are way more poorly written, regardless of perceived complexity.
> I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on
I’m glad we're on the same page then :)
Like I said, I’m not claiming AI outperforms in quality in all cases; it can be just as bad as human code can be. I just disagree with the idea that “human written” is a proxy for “quality code” in my experience.
I'd take that bet if it was measured in "bugs per day" instead of "bugs per LOC". LLMs generate far fewer bugs in absolute terms, but they also generate far more code, so it probably balances out if everything is equal. I think LLMs will actually lead to more bugs just because they're usually working with poorly defined requirements (prompts) and they guess to fill in the gaps based on the averages of their training data. A lot of those guesses are wrong.
Where LLMs win though is the severity. An LLM will write buggy code in the sense that it doesn't do what you wanted it, but not so much in the sense of security or data loss bugs. They get that right more than humans because they're trained to care about that stuff. There's far more "how to write good code" content in the training data than "how to not care about security and go fast" content (because writing that would be weird!)
You also go on to admit that the direct quality of the code is likely to better when written by AI — exactly the basis of what I argued — but wish to disagree with what I argued? An interesting position that I don’t quite follow.
The point was that using “human” as an indicator of “code quality” is nonsense. I get CB reasoning for disallowing “vibe-coded” apps when talking about the junk that people are constantly updating/building/deploying for an audience of none, wasting resources. Totally sensible from that perspective, but it takes a baby with the bath water approach that all vibe-coding is bad. I’m simply saying the point of view “if AI then bad, if human then good” isn’t grounded in reality and that your average developer is not producing high quality, well structured, well organized, well documented code. On average, it could be even odds as to whether that developer primarily works on Wordpress.
I'd put money on the average AI-coded project being of a worse quality, simply because the number of vibe-coders with no experience now outnumbers actual coders using AI-assist around 10 to 1.
I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
AI on average might write better code, but there's no way AI prompted by a shoe salesman is going to be better than code written by a person with even 2x years of experience.
Even those devs that are currently overseeing are gradually atrophying their critical thinking skills in this space.
In industry, certainly. The free-because-it's-a-hobby crowd will still be well served by Codeberg.
Much like how you can get very cheap mass-manufactured furniture, but some people still build their own tables and chairs.
That’s a pretty good analogy I may have to borrow :) You can also get high quality mass produced furniture but there’s still a group that will always prefer to build their own and set their own standards.
The acquisition cost is not relevant. Many people who can afford furniture still make their own. Many people who get free furniture break it down and make something else with it.
Programming is high-function job that requires knowledge in a million areas. I know I certainly can’t keep all of them in my head and frequently had to go back to documentation, or look up parameters, or how to implement that one pattern I used that one time that worked well in this situation or… The conclusion they draw is basically that “programming also made me dumber” because I didn’t remember them after working on a completely different project in a different language. I wholeheartedly agree thinking skills can atrophy with AI, but my view is that they are likely replaced by different thinking skills in other areas (e.g. improved prompting, improved structure, understanding harnesses, and so on. I used to write batch scripts often; I stopped, now I suck at it. If I paid someone else to write a batch script, I won’t suddenly remember everything I’ve forgotten but plenty people condemn AI for the equivalent result of paying someone else to do the programming.
Can you post some links to examples of such companies? It sounds really bad but I don't want to really believe it until I can see it with mine own eyes.
Even if an LLM generates "good" poetry, it did not, it mashed up elements of good poetry previously written by people, but stripped of all attribution, and stripped of all intents and insights of those original authors.
Since software has a function besides pure art, it's tempting to think of it as actually nothing but function, and so it doesn't matter how a functional thing comes about, merely that it functions. But I say there is more to software than that, and I'd rather not spend my own time and attention on things that no one else spent any of their own time and attention on.
Maybe codeberg is reacting too crudely, so maybe I don't defend them or this action fully in it's current form, but there is nothing ridiculous about the concept of a human-only filter being a seal of quality. The quality isn't the code all works the best, the quality is it's all human.
There's lots of people that appreciate art so I'm not saying this isn't a valid argument for wanting code from a real craftsperson. Just to me personally it feels like it shouldn't be, yet I feel similarly about it
I have no idea how you'd quantify that, but they're pretty good already. At least in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
I share everybody's concern about many aspects of LLMs; copyright, data collection, energy use, component prices, not to mention what it does to us: outsourcing our thinking, dependency, slop. And I don't entirely disagree wanting to limit that.
And yet, I have just written a library that I was planning to put on Codeberg, but I've used a lot of LLM assistance for it, because it's simply too big otherwise. I put a lot of effort on code quality and architecture, and I don't think this counts as slop, but I do think it violates Codeberg's new rule, so I guess I'll have to look for another place.
No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
How's your appetite for self hosting? I've only ever hosted the predecessor of Forgejo, Gitea, and that was a breeze. Sadly I'm not aware of other open source hosting platforms, like, if you search "forgejo is confirmed" (with quotes) you find a lot of instances, but the point of Codeberg was the (presumed) longevity
I'll have a look at Gitea. Otherwise it's probably going to be Github. Or I'll self host until I find something better.
Perhaps https://radicle.dev or https://tangled.org would be fine for you?
FWIW I just gave up and went back to GitHub. Not because I like it. I hate the organization.
But having been burned with the year long diversion through Codeberg, and actually caring about getting eyes and contributions on my project, I have no appetite for playing more games here and ending up back in the same situation in another year.
I could self-host, and I'm willing to front that cost. But it would be frankly at the cost of getting eyeballs and contributions. And come with hassle to boot.
I already had a read only mirror to GH from codeberg anyways.
I feel like we are already there. I am not vibecoding a lot, but I certainly use LLM-assisted coding now for most of my work. Once you go beyond vibe coding, an LLM feels a lot like a compiler from your well-specified ideas to code. So, to some extend, these restrictions feel like disallowing a higher-level programming language in a time when everyone was still writing machine code.
I understand where this decision is coming from (especially because they have been under attack by LLM bots) and it is well within their right, but the vague language adds a lot of uncertainty:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line? In such cases a project 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools', but the quality is probably not worse than fully hand-written code, especially because an LLM is often more able to 'think' of all kinds of corner cases.
I have some projects on Codeberg and donate monthly, but I have to reconsider both, since with this change Codeberg does not really align with how I work anymore. The projects that I have on Codeberg are largely human-written, but certainly use LLM-assistance for new code.
At any rate, I guess I'm back to GitHub until I have found a better alternative.
My impression is that they don‘t care, it’s still ”slop” for them and for most of coderbergers for that matter.
But I do exactly this. It‘s a code base that I have written prior manually, before LLMs, so now this helps a lot with boilerplate and add features. LLM-assisted is not vibe-coding, but FWIW I don‘t care what others think.
It would be nice to have concrete examples of that kind of project.
what you imply is only wanting 'professional' projects on there written by professional programmers. This seems like some exclusive membership would be more adequate. no need for fees, just invite the people whos code you like to see -_-
I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this:
Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there.
Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process.
And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off.
That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group.
... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.
I don't think this is a fair summary. I don't see this conflation in Codeberg's blog post. The words in quotation marks don't actually exist in Codeberg's blog post.
It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team. The concern is that some people don't gobble up an unfair amount of resources.
I personally have been moving to self-hosted Foregejo for ultimate freedom. But I also think it's fair for some providers have the freedom to take a bit more of a harsh (or based - depending on your perspective) stance against LLM generated code. I mean, a lot of people have been bemoaning the fact that the human-generated material has been increasingly hard to find in a sea of AI-generated material. It could be nice to have a corner of curated, human-made code still available on the web.
I feel like it may be closer to attention? That's the thing we actually value, that someone took the time and put in the effort to do something. And the quality depends on how much we value that attention. Like high effort low quality is praised when it's the work product of your child for instance.
That's not your problem.
But I guess you're right, as far as you go: none of this is my problem. I'm just a curious observer.
I did you wrong, and in general we shouldn't guess the motivations of others, but I'll still say that lot of the comments asking what is the exact meaning of that rule is, how it will get enforced precisely, strike me as seeking to undermine the validity of their decision rather than wanting to make sure they don't run afoul of it. Or even coming up with ideas to help them enforce that rule better. One even said maybe we should test if they actually can tell. I responded to you as if responding to that, and that was uncalled for.
Take the HN guidelines, for example. It's impossible to make them completely "clean cut" rules. But people know that if they genuinely think there's been a misunderstanding they want to clear up, they can contact HN. And with Codeberg it's probably like that, too. Not like Google, where the rules ideally should be 100% clear and mathematically accurate, because you just get nuked by algorithms with no recourse.
You might even say if people post on HN, they already understand what fuzzy rules are, by definition. They know language is fuzzy and that the letter of the law points at the spirit of the law. If someone doesn't want to understand that spirit, no amount of legalese detail will make them understand it. But of course that shouldn't be an argument to shut down discussion about it, either, and I didn't mean it like that.
Codeberg is different. It's a non-profit, so my criticism is mostly around all the heat and light that will be generated when they start banning projects (politically), and the amount of human effort that it will take to assess whether a project is "majority" written by AI. I just think the way the rule is written is fraught with issues that will cause a lot of wasted effort in the coming months and years.
What if he just throws wood randomly at the table saw and tries to sell whatever pieces come out?
(Never do this with a table saw, btw. They can, and will if you don't use proper procedures, throw wood sideways at speeds that can punch through walls and impale people)
Is a musician less of a musician if they use a pre-recorded back-beat and sing on top? Are you not a musician if you use the chord mode on a keyboard?
Is code not hand-written if my editor automatically closes all of my html? What if my editor flags all of the errors and I manually correct them? And what if it auto-corrects at the press of a button?
There is a line and I'm asking about it earnestly, but the table saw analogy doesn't reach it IMO.
Their stance is obvious: if you just want dumb git hosting with a freemium model, use something else.
So block huge resource use? What if people use LLMs with disproportionately tiny resource use?
So now your solution entails lowering the quota for everybody because allowing in LLyou must assume eve
Are you sure? It's pretty easy to find telltale signs of LLM usage, like the CLAUDE.md file, the '.cursor' directory, the 'vim'-sized codebase done in a week.
They are not. You can probably draft some query to get candidates based on those criteria. And so very quickly.
> Quotas are automated, evicting projects is highly manual.
The human world is very chaotic. Automation is not a panacea, which is highlighted by Big Tech abysmal support. Sometimes, you want humans to judge, because the optimal result is based on heuristics and not rules written in stone.
Terms of use should be read as a statement of intent, not a series of if-then statements.
So was it about high resource use, or a principle?
> People who are creating more by hand would still be allowed to have more breathing room.
What about the breathing of people creating by hand with a sprinkle of an LLM?
> but it's just a totally different approach.
Indeed, a better one where you manage directly the issue you claim to care about
In this corresponding blog post, one point made is that LLMs tend to LARP big-project infrastructure on small projects. They use the resources for something like GNOME but they aren't actually GNOME so they don't have any excuse for it.
And let's be real, most of the costs LLMs incur on hosting providers have little to so ln who makes commits. A popular project than bans LLMs from contributing, but is used often by LLMs that are using the project as a library is indistinguishable from one that allows LLM contributors.
So from a practical perspective, it's a head scratcher
In my opinion, not allowing LLM code at least signals that codeberg (and forgejo) itself is unlikely to be majority LLM code, which raises its stock in my book; It signals what kind of people the maintainers are.
Can you elaborate on this? It's new that we're judging what kind of people we're dealing with based on what tools they use.
Open source software that exists for its own sake is exceedingly rare, and understanding the goals of a community before becoming dependent on it is a good idea
I readily concede that there is a huge volume of inexperienced programmers generating crap, though.
It's basically Eternal September for programming.
It's trivial to detect when someone's coding with a chatbot - they tell you, repeatedly.
Nobody who doesn't code with a chatbot worries that it's hard to tell.
If someone has to ask whether their software is mostly AI-written, then it is.
If someone has to ask exactly how racist you have to be before you can be called a nazi, they're probably a nazi.
If someone has to ask how attracted to underage girls they can be before they're a pedophile, they're a pedophile.
If someone has to ask how responsible you have to be for a death before it's a murder, they're probably a murderer.
Because people who aren't these things clearly know that they aren't.
And, if those alternatives don't exist, well, you now understand why Codeberg is taking the position they are.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
---
> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
---
[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
Just saying "no spam" means you don't have to waste a single byte on spam and everyone else can have a higher quota.
For one, they've already done this to an extent. For two, they're also doing this by deciding what projects are and are not welcome on their service in the first place.
If 9 people eat an apple or two a day but a tenth person wants to eat 100 apples a day, we don't have to set some apple limit. We can tell the tenth person to pound sand and keep giving everyone else the apples they want.
Hell, I'd argue that Vibecode without the prompt that generated it isn't even real open source.
The learning doesn't come from copying and pasting code from stack overflow. It comes from
A) searching which code to copy and paste
and
B) Fixing the broken code that you just copied and pasted.
I suspect most programmers outgrow the "copying and pasting from stackoverflow" period of their development pretty quickly when they get frustrated by the fact that most of the stuff they were copying and pasting is broken or sub optimal in some way. If they prompt claude "write me a function", and then when it's broken they prompt "fix the broken function", they're learning (and doing!) a lot less.
DO NOT try to spin that into taking some form of moral high ground. DO NOT make yourself the arbiter of what is and is not considered a worthwhile project. That is not neutral. That is not free.
It's not fair for everyone to have to eat the costs of AI (like communities getting bulldozed for data centers) and just accept that it has to be used.
For example, in the case of being overloaded by AI contributions, a neutral solution would be to implement the same rate-limiting for every project. Set a sensible limit, and enforce it universally. Do not discriminate specific projects.
It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
Most vibe projects aren't even projects in the way that spam isn't even mail. The message says it's from my bank but it isn't. Why should I have the same limits on messages that say they're from my bank and messages that are actually from my bank?
Yes, human rights should apply to anybody, including war criminals. That is what makes them HUMAN rights.
Universal freedoms and neutrality should apply universally, including to waste-of-time-and-resources AI slop. That is what makes them UNIVERSAL and NEUTRAL.
> It is like saying Gmail shouldn't delete spam, but instead, should apply a limit of 1 message per day per destination per source address to all messages.
I said a REASONABLE limit should be applied. 1 message is not reasonable and you know yourself that this is a bad faith argument if you are honest.
1k messages on the other hand would be a reasonable limit. There is pretty much no legitimate use case for sending more than that to any specific address from any specific destination in a single day.
It is also bad faith because Gmail never claimed to be free or neutral.
My point is: Codeberg is not a neutral and free git forge. I wish that it was.
What they are doing is completely within their legal and moral rights. I just disagree with it.
He also has a lot of posts since: https://mastodon.social/@gedankenstuecke@scholar.social
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.
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...
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.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
By registering for a Codeberg account, you consent to our Privacy Policy [1] and agree to our Terms of Use. [2]
[0] <https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up>
[1] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/PrivacyPolicy.md>
I'm sure that if we were talking about a corporate entity, then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS" and "most ToSes are unenforceable", and guess what? In a world where significant AI assistance is becoming common, finding out which project is AI generated or even knowing the level of AI assistance is well nigh impossible and could be very well unenforceable.
Edit: It has come to my attention that Codeberg is a registered association[1]. It would be "fun" to see them argue about how they may argue that an AI assisted project has "harmed their reputation".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
This is unrelated to OP's claims that Codeberg not only doesn't make it clear that they "[P]rovide the essential infrastructure and organizational framework for the development of Open-Source Projects in decentralized and global communities, and other endeavours which serve this mission." and that "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.", but that Codeberg is unreasonable for not making that clear.
OP's assertions are why I said
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?
Eh? Codeberg's remedy is to cancel your account and attempt to ban you if you attempt to keep coming back and doing the things that got your account canceled. Do you intend to suggest that a European or USian court would disagree that Codeberg is permitted to do this?
No one is reading the ToS you know that very well. That you point out basic advice about ToS is satirical.
If a service like this has some surprising limitations for a potential user, it should be clear up front and not hidden in the ToS. Considering my first paragraph, they know that too.
What I'd suggest to you is that you go out and get head scritches and/or snuggles from a cutie. Not only will this provide you with a fun and positive social interaction, it'll give you the energy required to complain about things that you actually care about, and maybe even make some progress towards fixing them.
You didn't.
So, politely, why are you posting?
Codeberg setting such a high bar means FOSS is dead unless you are a company spending millions to fund something from day zero.
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
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.
I think the path they chose is better: stay on their mission to provide free services to FLOSS projects who need it.
They also start very small in terms of resources consumption.
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.
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.
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.
> 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/
As an illustrative example: Proton is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement.
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.
> [...] 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.)
Times change.
Free services owe no one, anything. If you are joining a community, be respectful.
If you're not, and you get banned, that sucks. If it causes a whole category of your peers to be banned that sucks too.
…but its a bit rich to say, oh yeah, the promises you made before LLMs were a thing didn't include a note saying “except if you spam AI generated code”.
Come on.
They dont owe anyone anything.
Certainly not for some comment from ten years ago.
This could entirely legitimately be a case of “was this decision made the right way according to their own decision making process?” … but “is it ok for then to have made this decision?”
Yes. Its fine. It’s their platform. They can do whatever they want.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect
Maybe we could blame them for having lowered their ambitions around "lesser" FOSS, but then again the economics are changing.
Which I think might be the cause of confusion here. I suspect that there was never an official statement (or intention) of Codeberg being a full GitHub replacement, but since a lot of people recommended it as an alternative to GitHub, it started to be seen that way.
I'm happy to be proven wrong, though, as I'm quite confused about the outrage about Codeberg's decision. At least in my mind, Codeberg was already a highly opinionated forge (with the private repo ban and all), so this was not much of a surprise.
A couple weeks ago I froze them, when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 came up. Not because of the LLM policy as such, but because this thread 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.
> bwahahahahahaha are u gonna preach “no politics” now too. free software is inherently dogmatic, screw playing centrist
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.
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...
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.
And that's ok, noone owes you free hosting.
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.
Codeberg is a service.
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-...
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.
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.
Let them have their little corner of the internet and just stay away. There's plenty of alternatives run by people who don't feel the need to bring their personal baggage into a cooperative environment.
I like most of his work, but his politics make Source Hut too shaky of a foundation to build on.
If no third-party or community wants to take you in, then I suppose you're going to have to start one for like-minded people. If there aren't any, then I suppose you've lost the marketplace of ideas.
Isn't that how this is supposed to work?
ssh user@host
mkdir myproject
git init --bare myproject
The remote URL is user@host:myproject (relative to user home dir) or user@host:/home/user/myproject (absolute path)
docker run data.forgejo.org/forgejo/runner:12 forgejo-runner
Even Immoral and Amoral companies serve values that others might consider 'baggage'.
Palantir worshipping death and war has caused their civilian contracts to suffer and languish. This is baggage; It may be their own death knell.
'(amorally) maximizing shareholder value (for the next quarter)' is (for me) an insane value system on its face, and makes problems for everyone around them, yet who argue like you are here don't see that as 'personal baggage' at all.
We'd all be using WinXP SE and IE6.
"The personal is political" is a truly toxic idea that's been corroding nice things since it's inception.
Insanity. IMO. Keep that stuff at home.
> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?
This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".
By that silly logic I guess codeberg is supporting the uyghur genocide because they don't mention it.
Codeberg is in Germany yet I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine, which they helped finance by building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas. I guess by ops logic that means codeberg is in favor of Russian aggression.
Yet,
> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine
that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.
https://blog.codeberg.org/one-year-into-the-war-your-help-is...
> I guess by ops logic
I don't think so. Them being involved or not in the thing makes all the difference.
Edit: casual sinophobia BTW
He's known for staying focused on one single issue, which is important for personal reasons unrelated to group affiliations.
The people who were angry at RMS's "politics" were always actually mad at the concept of Free Software in general, and the fact that RMS thinks that software that is not Free is bad software (and does not think you are an exception.) He wasn't banging on about trans rights or Muslamic invasions, but people being enslaved by machines run by the powerful.
Doesn't mean that he didn't have opinions, he just knew why people cared what he thought. When he ventured a bad (but common) opinion about sleeping with teenagers, it opened a hole that his enemies drove a truck through. It's also notable that he did this to defend his friend Minsky; people often compromise their professionalism over personal relationships and interests.
I have not read much of what he said about it, but he recently said that it is absurd that variations in the age of consent means something can be rape in one country but completely legal in another (e.g. US vs UK vs Italy).
He also earlier claimed that that minors could consent to sex and not be harmed. While I loathe that claim, it does not seem right that many other people who made the same claim (a number of British politicians and civil rights activists have endorsed, as have similar people in other countries) it seems odd that the latter get away with it and Stallman does not. I think its the people in positions of power (e.g. politicians) who most need to resign (permanently!) for having held those views.
Strong agree. He has millions of opinions, all nicely catalogued on his personal website. He even has an RSS feed: https://stallman.org/rss/rss.xml if you're keen to know what he thinks about this or that US politics issue.
But he didn't abuse his control of the FSF to pursue his own politics, he kept the organisation strictly focused on software freedom. It's at risk of being completely irrelevant if tries to expand beyond its niche of software freedom.
The ethics of AI, code generation, and hosted software would be within the FSF's remit, though I think the policies of any specific code hosting site wouldn't be.
the reason we have linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand. i understand that you can't fight every battle, but that doesn't mean you shouldn't fight any battles.
you're making a rationalization because taking a stand is usually inconvenient, and you don't want to be inconvenienced by anything.
The reason we have a Linux is because a bunch of geeks took a stand on an issue they cared about and _focused on_. We wouldn't have Linux if the project also took on matters like teenage pregnancy, surveillance, and gerrymandering.
I'm personally sick of all the politics in OSS development, as such, I no longer actively contribute.
Different strokes for different blokes/whatever floats your boat. I don't care, do as you please.
Yes. Let me stop you right there: Yes, absolutely. Whatever they claim their reasons are, it's not my problem. I don't care.
The last Codeberg story that popped up here just this week was something about them banning Bitcoin. At that pace you should worry whether you're next.
Which is why my advice is: Avoid the headache. Go somewhere else.
You can't let your strong principles get in the way of being practical in this kind of world! It's kinda impossible to be as absolute as you want to be but also have your head-in-the-sand about it. You kinda gotta pick one of those..
At the very least, just not a good look from the outside IMO.
Put differently: are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted with the goal of CHANGING the world? Or are you making decisions based on principles that are crafted to NAVIGATE a dynamic, fuzzy, ever-changing world?
(Also you can enclose things in * to emphasize on this site btw. There is a little grey 'help' next to the comment box.)
I think you're asking why I call the heuristics for navigating the world "principles"?
Principles come in 3 distinct flavors:
a) Rule of conduct. The standard you hold yourself to regardless of circumstance or convenience. Examples can be honesty, fairness, loyalty, or non-violence.
b) Organizing idea in a field. General concept that explains or governs range of specific cases. They're not moral rules, they're explanatory or decision-making frameworks.
c) Foundational truth or law. Basic proposition that underlies a system of thought. E.g. conservation of energy is principle that isn't proven within the system but a foundation the rest of the system is built on. Axioms play the same role in logic or mathematics.
In this thread, I'm using principles in the (b) sense, whereas I think the author of the article and some of the sentiment in the discussion anchor on the (a) sense.
In practice, one has to find a balance you can live with between (a) and (b), since they can be in tension.
I think in this schema, I am still saying a good (b) principle for anyone is probably something like "have knowledge of the (a)s of things and people you depend on, so you can know if any of your other (b)s might cause some conflict down the line".
Why would the latter be better than the former ?
But I don't have a horse in this race. I self-host my code using Fossil.
Reading this in text is unreasonably funny. Thanks for the chuckle
No. LLMs and blockchain are the same kind of shit.
Codeberg is not for me, I could never get over them keeping the anubis anime girls on, but it would be nice if open source communities were a bit more open. There will always be a line to draw but some of the current rules feel arbitrary.
My nice desktop that I use for C++/Rust/Formal Verification takes multiple minutes sometimes, and I'd rather not replace the motherboard over this, or figure out why it's not using the GPU/whatever.
OTOH, I have a MacBook with Apple's terrible window manager. It blows through it in a few seconds. The same is true of my ancient phone, and some newer low-power mini-pc's, etc.
To be fair, that seems like a bit of an odd detail to obsess over.
A service could be bright pink for all I care* as long as it just works without me having to worry about checking their blog for the latest decrees being handed down on a daily basis.
* Take that with a grain of salt because my - in some people's eyes - questionable stylistic choices are the direct cause of a couple hundred userstyles and scripts out there.
It’s a choice to not use it but also a choice the folks that decide to keep it shown.
It is absolutely that communities choice but I see it as a tell for how the folks think about running their community and as these new rules are being made aligns with the assumptions I already made.
Similar to how I migrated from post hog when then created that fabulously confusing OS UI. Or I wouldn’t use a service that used Pepe memes.
In summary: A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.
I guess no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, but they've intentionally and significantly lowered the bar with these decisions. I'm happy they did this before I bothered to migrate. Does anyone know of a good alternative to Forgejo? I was thinking of self hosting, but now I just want nothing to do with this organization.
Forgejo is unaffected by this because it's the software not the service and is not subject to the service's terms of service. You're misunderstanding the scope of this policy change.
The policy change means that some free software projects are no longer welcome on codeberg, specifically because those projects take a stronger stance towards protecting free software than codeberg.
What am I misunderstanding? Why should I trust them as stewards of forgejo?
See a trend? Maybe you can be the next.
Forgejo is, and remains FOSS.
Codeberg provides a free service and is under no obligation to cater to cryptobros and vibecoders. You can buy a VM and host your own.
You cannot support FOSS and then get mad when people use those freedoms to create a service that matches their ideas and philosophies.
That's worse than just some random group lying loudly about its intentions. They're getting tax benefits that probably should be yanked unless they change their charter. They also accepted donations to further the existing charter, and they're doing the opposite.
It appears to be just that:
> The vote follows ongoing efforts by Codeberg to prevent automated software (bots) from taxing its infrastructure with excessive network requests. Authors Bastian Greshake Tzovaras, Otto Richter, and William Zijl argue that AI companies are shifting costs to others and damaging online communities in the process.
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/23/codeberg-gi...
(2) Vibe coding agents like Claude Code, Codex, Copilot and the grok thing all prefer local copies of a project to scraping web services. Why would a developer using LLMs be hammering their own codeberg site?
(3) If they are worried about AI companies shifting costs (What costs though? See point 1), they should block training scrapers, or - even better - offer a service that resells zero-log-retention / enclaved open-weight LLM inference. This cuts off the revenue stream to the AI companies, and probably lets codeberg skim a bit to expand their own services.
We used to use github at work. It was falling over well before cursor was a thing. Blaming AI for their 1-2 nines of availability is... questionable.
> Yup, platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear (spoiler: it won't.)
> GitHub Actions has grown from 500M minutes/week in 2023 to 1B minutes/week in 2025, and now 2.1B minutes so far this week.
This had to spill over into Codeberg as well, right?
Because a significant percentage of "developers using LLM" have no clue what they are doing?
This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...
In it Stallman gets dangerously close to admitting it's possible to be worse than Microsoft Windows. After documenting spyware and universal back doors in Windows, the section of the article comparing proprietary software to SaaS concludes:
SaaSS is equivalent to running proprietary software with spyware and a universal back door. It gives the server operator unjust power over the user, and unjust power is something we must resist.
It even has a section towards the end addressing the slippery slopes that github-style services provide:
Use of simple software repositories is not SaaSS because most of the actual work (as distinguished from redistribution) is done in the contributors' computers. However, when the repository starts doing other kinds of computing work for the users, such as running tests, that starts to cross the line. When the users are contributing to the project, so the work is the project's work rather than the contributor's work, that still is not SaaSS for the users. But it may be SaaSS for the project. However, if the testing means running the programs that the project develops, it is not SaaSS because the project does control the crucial software being run.
You haven't provided any evidence that Codeberg is trustworthy.
No they're not. The four freedoms apply only to software licences.
- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube
- Amazon.com: waifu pillow
When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):
As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.
(Asking because they've both become routine problems for me with most browsers, probably since I disable cookies + run an ad blocker).
I still haven't allowed Cloudflare, though. That is bounce or incognito.
Archive.is blocks agents, I think, but you get the idea.
Also, I really wonder what the economics are for your example. The JS boilerplate for the anubis landing page is usually longer than the piece of information I need.
(That's ignoring the actual anubis JS, which is probably on a privacy-destroying shared CDN link).
The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.
The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.
Fortunately this functionality doesn't change your browser history, but it did really annoy me for a bit
But, wait, Codeberg always had limitations on what projects are hosted there??? This been very explicit from the start, it's for FOSS and anything outside of that isn't welcome. It's one of the reasons I donate there in the first place. Now they're adding additional requirements, which most of the voting memebers voted for, this doesn't seem strange to me.
> Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.
Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.
Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read, and seems it auto-closes no matter where you click. Seems a bit distracting if nothing else :)
It's different conceptions of freedom. For some, the freedom to oppress is not freedom at all, and building non-free software is oppressive.
> Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read
Yes, clicking makes it go away! It's an overlay that opens when you leave the page, saying you should really not run Javascript programs sent by the web server because they can do pretty much anything.
It is for FOSS, but they seem to be more restrictive now than even that, and I don't mean by LLMs. To quote their blog post: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice: > > 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 do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.
Ironically, I migrated to it from SourceHut because of similar rules introduced there.
I personally have trust in the human community behind codeberg. I understand if you don't. But my question is: why go with a non-profit host if you're not going to get involved in the governance? Of course governance is always happening in a project. For me, that power is shared and decisions are transparent are a criterium to trust codeberg even more.
They use Anubis and block LLM scraping, but that sounds useful to me!
SourceHut prohibits anything cryptocurrency- or blockchain-related, so it's less restrictive now, but I didn't like this random opinionated addition to ToS back then and Codeberg felt like a nice alternative.
Where to, if I may ask? Are there any stable FOSS-emphasizing (preferably EU-based) alternatives (outside of just self-hosting)?
That's.. good, actually. I believe that even if Codeberg was good and perfect for every use case of code hosting, not every one and every project should be there. Vibe-coders, shitcoin cryptomaxis, and lovers of total freedom surely have other places to go and are able to set up forges using the same software that Codeberg uses as well. It's the magic of open source.
Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet. GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, sure, they might have been better back in the day, but being _the_ places for a type of content online they were able to privatize a lot of very valuable data, sell it off for AI training, while slowly strangling to death any interoperability and "public access" that once made the services feel like a free-for-all market square of the internet. Long live the small web!
Codeberg is not in any way obligated to make sweeping infrastructure changes just to make sure that they can keep hosting projects they find to be against their mission.
There's a reason these came to be in the first place though, and accounts are among the most prominent ones. A new forum means not just registering at yet another place, it also means creating a new label/folder in your email inbox and a new filter rule to properly redirect stuff. That's friction.
There's always the email option, too. "Found a bug? Email bugs@example.com." - that's the original decentralised discussion forum.
Entitled? It's a necessity due to everyone and their dog either getting hacked or selling email addresses to spammers outright.
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
For resource limited platform selecting their focus is just right. It would be like running food bank in some extremely rich neighbourhood. And people living there complaining of not getting caviar and Japanese wagyu...
E.g. as a European my idea of freedom of speech is not limited to the things I am allowed to say, but also about whether spaces exist in which I can say them. US style freedom of speech, doesn't produce any more insightful or free discourse than over here. In fact I'd argue it produces a discourse where voices win that are the loudest, most outrageous and least respectful, while voices that are more reasonable are frightened away.
It is the same thing that happens if a state gives up her monopoly of violence: The strongest dominate, while the weaker, more peaceful ones suffer.
Freedom is not just the freedom to do X, it is also the freedom of not having X done to you, as well as the freedom of living in a space where doing X is actually possible.
This means a free society does not have to endure all voices, especially those that aim at harming others or have the goal of using freedom of speech to get rid of the free society. Don't like the rules of a free society? Then you don't get to easily claim the protections granted by one. You can't whine to the referee if your goal is to get rid of the referee — I mean you could, but that would be pathetic.
We delegate these rules to governments to secure the individuals rights to life, liberty, and happiness (as your declaration of independence so wonderfully puts), not because we want to allow shitheads to allow to shittalk. This is just a side-effect we all have to endure, because we don't want governments to police all speech.
That means also in the US not everything you could say goes unpunished by the government, especially if you're not white, male and christian. Remember, the police is part of the government and if they can shoot you because they thought they have seen a gun, they can also shoot you because of what you said.
On top of that we, collectively, form governments for (among others) the purpose of protecting each others speech, not just from governments, but from each other, from our bosses, coorporations, from the police. That means, we collectively, use the government as a governing body tho whom we delegated certain powers. Where to draw the line is different in different regions of the earth. For example the female nipple printed in many European newspapers would not be protected speech in the US for puritan religious reasons.
I don't have to let you in, feed you and offer you a bed for the night. You can be free out there.
Where on Earth does this sentiment come from? I've had people make AI contributions to my open-source projects and while they may be perhaps less technical on average they're every bit as well intentioned - possibly moreso since they're interested in improving the project rather than establishing a little fiefdom.
using AI is not vibe coding. the difference is whether a developer takes responsibility and the according measures before releasing/contributing or not.
The "developer" could be a bot, or a tool-assisted criminal or activist, and they might be using LLMs to enhance their ability to add stealthy malware, plant patent or copyright violations, impose not quite shared technical choices, and so on.
Many open source projects ban AI contributions just because they are an efficiently low effort way to waste the time of the actual maintainers.
E.g. I've had people find genuine bugs and then basically paste their entire Claude conversation into the issue. Very annoying.
There is no sure way to identify LLM code. I could write a project by hand with all the GPT "mannerisms" for fun. I could sign my commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" because my cat's name is Claude and I find it funny.
Now this rule will either be never applied or when it's applied it will be an arbitrary decision made with mostly inconclusive "evidence". This is not a good way to write rules.
Write rules based on merit. Excessive data usage or licensing problems might come to mind. These things are measurable. Otherwise it's really just posturing.
> Now this rule will either be never applied or when it's applied it will be an arbitrary decision made with mostly inconclusive "evidence".
Or people just lie. Which is the whole problem with not having a strong way to determine code's origin. And it's also a tad ridiculous because if done correctly, the seams between my thoughts and those of the agent shouldn't be apparent. If it's utilizing existing patterns in my codebase that I've written by hand, then you wouldn't even know.
Codeberg is making decisions to better manage their resource and infrastructure. It's no different than any other privately owned platform, making decisions to forbid certain kinds of content, or ban people for various reasons. Unlike other large centralized platforms, they at least tried to involve the community in this decision-making process, but in the end it's their call.
If you don't want to be under the mercy of someone else's decisions, you have to become more independent and host it yourself. Even then, who owns your server? Who owns the "pipes" of the network? They have terms of services, and can also ban you for various reasons, including your nationality, beliefs, etc. This line of thinking leads to a bigger question of how/whether a truly decentralized and free (as in freedom) computing and communication network is possible, how such a network can defend against abuse and malicious actors without compromising that freedom.
"the right to use the content for any purpose, including both commercial and non-commercial purposes" "Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement"
So yes, "the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken", nothing really new actually.
IMHO, deciding to migrate because of a disagreement that doesn't have practical consequences on the author is a bit of an overreaction. It is not, by the way, a full ban on LLM, as the clause says mostly LLM-generated, a term that has been criticized for its vagueness in other places, but that does leaves some room for thoughtful use.
But why stop using a service we are satisfied with because of virtual future other decisions that might or might not affect us? It's like if people left their country before the candidate for president they fear, is even elected.
Not related, but this is an assumption one should automatically reject as soon as it comes to mind.
People do like change, when it is for the better. People have happily moved from SVN to Git, from Vi to Neovim, from Coke to Pepsi (find better examples yourself) etc... People may be emotional about change, but they are not stubborn (generally). Usually they just don't perceive the benefits of the new thing (or they are outweighed by the drawbacks for them). Sometimes "better" has a subjective part that you can't argue about, so you have to "agree to disagree". But it's better to disagree on an opinion than to assume that they don't like change.
All those people were just told they're not welcome.
BTW the nuance in the blog post is retroactive and done after the vote was completed. The vote had no such nuance and requests for clarification were refused.
Is anyone else extremely annoyed with the way this is written? To me it reeks of paternalistic arrogance that simultaneously exposes the author's armchair psychological headcanon about how they imagine people to work with LLMs.
That's the hard truth: Vibe coders are addicted to using LLMs. You're going to reject that. You're now going straight to typing up a response about how I'm wrong. But addicts often cannot accept they are addicts. It's why the first step is always recognizing you have a problem, because even that is a hard step.
Tech is full of people who think they're smarter than everyone else, which, as always, makes you more susceptible to addiction. If you think "I'm smart, I can't get addicted. I can tell the difference." then no. No you can't.
Thanks for offering yourself as a prime example.
> [From CodeBerg] It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
> This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows
Yes! And LLMs can be valuable to solo devs!
> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did...
I agree this is troubling.
There's a lot of LLM dislike that verges into a potentially problematic ideology. I know: how a tool is used, not the tool itself, etc, but I'm unsure that that kind of approach is visible to CodeBerg. I write open source, and closed source, and I am a responsible developer who uses AI and gets more done, better. I wish I was welcome there.
Also, despite what your remote view suggests, members of non-profits usually have political opinions. Codeberg was founded for political reasons by people with political opinions: the members aren't waiting for someone on Mastodon to have an opinion.
Also, apart from this, people having opinions and encouraging others to defend their opinions is quite normal democratic process in a non-profit. Nothing to see here.
I never claimed anyone could vote.
To be honest though, I don’t know what happens when something gets banned from Codeberg, or anything about the appeals process, so my brain leap to the project just disappears forever; afaik the posts I read about this policy change didn’t say. Would welcome anyone familiar with their policies to chime in and enlighten me.
They could've found so many more legitimate reasons for not wanting pure vibe code on their platform (load, resource constraints, github's uptime since AI assistance became mainstream, etc) but they chose the virtue signalling path instead.
We shall stay curious.
Just like forever chemicals. LLMs cause a lot of problems and they should not be disregarded.
> We shall stay curious.
Curiousity is fine. But critical thinking is still advised
Curiosity and critical thinking are both important when it comes to new technologies, agree.
Agree too that LLMs can cause problems. However, I see a real net plus for me (in comparison, I never understood well why blockchain was so hyped). As a non-developer but with technical background, I can now create my own software tools or modify available tools for my needs; LLMs are also fantastic tutors - this feels like progress. I can imagine that researchers in many disciplines also feel this.
At the same time I am scared, because many of my skills are just obsolete. And the environmental consequences are also "problematic". On the other hand, individual transport and industrial agriculture are (my intuitive take) much worse.
If you're a vegan as your nick suggests, i would suggest to reconsider this point. Capitalism was already bent on sending us towards a 6th mass species extinction (starting right under our noses), but so-called AI has changed the scale and speed of the curb drastically in only a few years. See for example this article for recent Google stats:
https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to...
Recent AI datacenter projects such as Stratos (40000 acres) are on a scale of industrial destruction my mind fails to comprehend.
I'm not 100% vegan, but i'm 100% "AI-vegan", and i definitely would recommend you considering it.
PS: All i said was just about the environmental impact of LLMs. I suspect the human impact to be just as bad (cognitive impairment, accrued exploitation, etc).
So okay, if you're concerned about the risk of liability from unclear copyright status, I suppose that's fine, but then why the “mostly”? It's not like the copyright status becomes less unclear by you supplementing with 50% hand-written code.
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
There is a certain amount of fuzzy thinking, but I think what is significant about this is that Codeberg is not a neutral place for FOSS software. It is a place for FOSS that Codeberg considers good - so no LLM code, no crypto related code, and no doubt more to come. I think it feels odd to people because its a different set of values to FOSS licences which are designed to be apolitical and neutral - a software license that stated that the software could not be used for crypto or in LLM projects would not be a FOSS license.
So, their "copyright status is unclear" stance seems to be saying "it is unclear if the contributor can copyright the code, or if it cannot be copyrighted", but that argument does not make any sense:
"Not copyrightable" means "no one has a right to enforce a copyright on this".
If that is their objection, they need to run scrubs for public domain works + delete those too. God help them if they want to host old UNIX software. Unless someone has renewed the copyrights on stuff written before 1979, the copyright has already lapse, making it "not copyrightable".
If, alternatively, they're worried about inadvertent plagiarism, then they already have to have mechanisms to deal with intentional plagiarism, so no action is required.
If they're trying to impose their values on users by micromanaging acceptable use of third parties' computers, well, I agree: That's explicitly in violation of the definition of Free and Open Source software, so they're basically just ignoring their non-profit mission statement.
> The legal exposure for this for codeberg is basically zero in the US, thanks to the DMCA.
They are in Germany and they distribute software globally (i.e. you can clone or download code from anywhere) so zero liability in the US is not enough.
I think you are being rather harsh on them, but I think your point is more evidence that the real reasons are the ones in the blog, and they should probably remove copyright as a justification in the ToS.
Because it's all vibes, all the way down. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced. If they get bad vibes from your project, they kick you out.
The problem in here is German laws, particularly stuff like the "Störerhaftung", and what Codeberg wants is a fast avenue to yeet projects that cause an undue amount of trouble for a non-profit organization.
> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did, through a dark blue banner at the top of the site on the day it was already settled.
You're an ordinary user, not a member of Codeberg e.V., the people running the show. Want to take part in the governance of the association, join in.
In general, these rules have been known for a very long time, boiled down it is "don't be a dick and don't allow others to use your property to be a dick" in law. Of course, for Americans who are used to acting like dicks with impunity towards each other and everyone else, this being coded in law is anathema.
"Politicians send SWAT teams to the homes of people, famously in the case of Andy Grote, where someone replied "you're such a dick" to one of Grote's tweets. Grote reported this to the police, the attorney general figured out who the poster was, and sent a SWAT team (6 police officers!) to confiscate all their electronic devices. This is not an isolated case; this happens frequently."
Nah mate, Germans are famously thin skinned and have built an authoritarian state to protect their feelings.
and users are within their rights to say Codeberg's actions are shitty, could've been done in a better way for same effect, and are problematic enough to raise all sorts of alarms and recommendations of avoiding any positive connotations in the future
Then they are just a (commercial) club that has to pay taxes.
The migration towards codeberg already started a while ago, don't see how it can scale.
Banning a portion of their community is... one way to reduce server load.
There are registered paying members with voting rights. You can easily become one. Clearly not many of them are vibecoders.
Codeberg sounds great, but from using it day-to-day, it's really slow sometimes, and frequently times out (from Perth, AU, if it matters). This is not just the SSH protocol for git pushes, but also for browsing.
(I do have a self-hosted forgejo (came from gitea), it's great, Postgres database backs up, files are easy to backup, it's also git so I can just mirror it elsewhere as well.). I love their self-hosted runners is super simple to host.
Bit random, but for code search, does anyone have any recommendations?
My current process is to just `git clone <REPO>` onto my server, then use ripgrep (Can't beat good ol' plain text search).
The result is that this is hundreds of GB -- I like to clone everything I use, dependencies etc, to then be able to look at source code. (I use quite a few languages/ecosystems, and sometimes reading the source code is the best way to figure something out).
I've tried Sourcebot (just for the code search, I don't care about "MCP"/"AI") etc, but was wondering if anyone has recommendations.
GitHubs code search is great, but it doesn't find everything, and it is also incredibly rate limited (annoying when trying to narrow something down, and you then get rate limited). I use this when trying to figure out random Apple issues - someone somewhere has figured it out usually.
Let me know if it fails in some area and I’ll fix it.
For context, forgejo does have [code search](https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/search/code-search/), which is simple to enough.
I like forgejo/gitea - a single app.ini, postgres for the database. Done through a docker compose.
Last time I ran gitlab, it required oodles of memory - it's just me!
> You can just self-host GitLab CE and use self-hosted ElasticSearch integration to set up code search. I really don't understand the point of Forgejo, sounds like making your life harder
Sounds like more steps/maintenance/hassle and a more complicated than just using forgejo for my own personal projects, forgejo uses <120MB of memory for me, has runners, etc.
Isn't it better to invest your time in setting up GitLab once and not have to deal with Forgejo being a toy project?
It literally takes 1 compose.yaml to self-host GitLab Omnibus, and 1 compose.yaml for the runner. You have been misled by suckless fans if you think that self-hosting GitLab is more complex than Forgejo.
> Last time I ran gitlab, it required oodles of memory - it's just me!
It requires what, 8GB of RAM? That's not "oodles" by any definition.
It’s a constant pattern.
Principles are hard I guess.
Freedom in general is always a compromise to some extent.
Principles are hard, I guess.
I know it's hard but any non-casual developer must self-host their version control (and assorted project data), and treat cloud VCs sites just as mirrors.
I think it is just that people where very naïve about what Codeberg was going to be. Github has their own incentive about who they want to work with, what feature they develop, etc. Codeberg, as a real organization, made up of real people, operating in the real world, is also not free of incentive. It was never going to be this perfectly fine neutral platform for everyone. If you want the freedom to do whatever you want (in you own limitation due to the jurisdiction that apply to you), you have to do it yourself.
TL;DR: AI assisted coding, when used responsibly, is not banned, however one-shotting something via vibe-coding and hosting it as a complete project, is.
Also, Codeberg always had a limit on private repositories and never wanted to be a place for non-FLOSS software. It's their mission. They are not out there to replace GitHub/GitLab.
On Tuesday I was working on my Braille 'N Speak emulator[0], an ancient Z180-based accessible notetaker for the blind. I wanted a z180 emulation library that wasn't z180-emu (GPL) and that I could use on the web via wasm, on my phone, and would have a Python binding.
Of course, this is a perfect sort of job for an agent with a verification loop, so I went off and researched if there were any standard conformance suites for z80/z180. Turns out there are a ton! I wired up my verification loops, fired off /goal, and sat back. Now, I have my library[1].
Was "AI assisted coding" "used responsibly?"
Should this sort of thing be allowed? Why or why not?
Sorry, but seriously.
If it works (and we constantly see LLMs cheat to pass tests), and helps someone, more power to you and them, but no, this is what vibe-coding squarely is, and what Codeberg explicitly excludes.
I see two big problems with that codebase: - No human, incl. you can modify this meaningfully. - The AI wrote it won't be able to touch it again, too.
So it's write-once software, and this is the biggest problem with vibe-coded software.
> so many people who have made "coding with an LLM" their whole personality
As opposed to "coding without an LLM" being their whole personality? Neither of these are what a personality is. Comments like thesen are needlessly dismissive and not conducive to a healthy discussion.
Codeberg has every right to set their own standards, but the discussion around it is ugly and dismissive of many well-meaning developers.
The mail, coming from Atlassian, is encouraging people to let swarms of agents loose to "develop" something from a simple prompt, and suggesting Jira can act as a context store with all the new features they implemented.
So, people are expected to make "coding with an LLM" their personality or modus operandi, unfortunately.
I agree that the discourse can be gentler, kinder and have a more open stance, yet Mastodon has this 500 character limit which causes statements to go blunt. I experience the same problem while trying to post there.
However, this doesn't invalidate Codeberg's stance. There's a slop problem everywhere, and people want to stop or slow it down. I'm in the same camp with Codeberg, and don't want vibe-coded applications pushed as man-made creations.
Also, to reiterate, Codeberg doesn't hardline the policy. They effectively ban vibe-coded projects, and if that matters, this is why I like them, and why I like some other services I use.
To close, yes, people are irritated by AI powered vibe-coding and respond too harshly, but I can understand them. Maybe we should understand why the "ugly" response exists before shunning them, so we can arrive to a more constructive place.
Doesn't seem to be what they put in their ToS:
>You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
Unless you've defined "responsibly" in a funny way.
I realize this doesn't work for everyone, and not everyone has the money to spare, but it's really nice to be able to host your own stuff on your own website, and not be tied down to a forge like github or codeberg.
Bonus points if you have the hardware and network capacity to host this at home!
However, Github and Others can also ban or delete my stuff anytime. But the feeling is a different. Because now I'm thinking what's next?
Tolerance is a beautiful thing, but it can also be painful. Perhaps, in general, it's better to make individual decisions rather than relying on sweeping statements.
Banning LLMs and crypto sounds more like a move made by a fearful, angry person and has little to do with openness.
The changes made by Codeberg e.V. are:
First:
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
Second:
> - Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects.
Now, I know them. IC no issue.
I can only imagine the backlash if GitHub adopted the same policy.
btw it was clear that this would come, and it was just a matter of time, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087405
"People used GitHub's free infrastructure for over a decade without complaining. Now AI-generated spam and massive amounts of low-quality code are increasing costs everywhere, and suddenly GitHub is the bad guy for acting like a business. Criticizing centralization is fair, but pretending GitHub gave nothing to open source is just dishonest. Alternatives today, are probably going to be flooded by the low-quality AI generated code tomorrow..."
Not even this. Most open source software is solely used by the creator and usually soon after abandoned. The idea of starting a new project and abandoning it after the honeymoon period is nowhere near a new phenomenon.
To me, this is the key point: Service providers should be neutral. Especially ones claiming to be free as in freedom.
Only get involved insofar as it is required by law, and stay out of it otherwise. Individuals can have their opinions and biases, but keep them out of the platforms.
You people keep forgetting that free software is inherintly political and so platforms are more than wellcome of taking a stance. If you don't like don't use it. Quite simple
If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?
By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions
Is that a joke? Both have made it abundantly clear that yes, this is their stance. Let me quote literally the FIRST freedom RMS put into writing:
> The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose.
This is explicitly free and neutral. "for any purpose", no restrictions. Linus endorsed this stance by licensing the kernel under GPLv2, and has repeatedly upheld this view ever since, making the argument again and again that he does not want to restrict what people do with the project.
Even in his famous announcement message, before adopting GPL, Linus said:
> I'm doing a (free) operating system
Then he licensed Linux with his own free license, before adopting GPL.
> Full source must be available (and free)
Freedom is and has always been important to both RMS and Linus.
> If I dont like the direction an open source project is taking and I fork it. Does make it less free?
No. In fact it is one of the freedoms guaranteed by free software.
> By your line of thought project should all have MIT licenses because you should not add restrictions
There are people making that argument, but there are also people arguing that guaranteeing freedom requires more conditions. There is no real consensus on this question.
Seriously, just host your own Forgejo if it's that much of a problem. It's right there.
origin --> codeberg github --> github
I may add others. Redundancy is a good thing.
In this case, you seem to have a robust democratic process, with a not for profit board, membership, voting rights and more.
Meanwhile GitHub had a better policy despite having the worst possible governance model from an open source perspective (it was a corporation, and likely mostly top down for most of its meaningful development).
But thankfully GitHub was full of great people for the first 15 years or so.
Do people know Codeberg well and migrate to it anyways, or they just don't know? If the former, wondering what gets you to that point.
Being from Germany I wondered from day-one how the project's "freedom"-promise ("We celebrate free culture, openness") would eventually work out, because lets face it, Germany is not a free-spech crazed country, even less so are its tech-people and especially not the culture in Berlin.
So the idea of a Berlin-based e.V. full of German sysadmins voting on said "freedom" made this LLM-crypto-kerfuffle exactly as surprising as raw milk spoiling fast in sunshine.
But anyways, we're not talking about free speech laws, we're talking about an association, a club (ie. "e.V.") where things get decided according to majority vote. That's where "German Speech law" doesn't apply, but culture does.
"e.V."s are basically German offline versions of reddit. And if you believe it when a subreddit run by German SysAdmins promises you to be "free and open" – well, i got a bridge to sell to you.
- They explicitly require all hosted software to have a FLOSS license
- Private repos are only allowed in support of Public FLOSS repos, with a scary ambiguous note about "really small and personal stuff"
- Projects with heavy use of coding AI are explicitly forbidden
For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:
> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.
> 2. 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. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
Why would you even assume they allow private repos?
I encounter Codeberg as a forge first, then have to dig in to discover that it's a highly opinionated service with a different business model than most similar entities.
It’s a never ending drama, and every quarter there’s something new to hate on or get offended by.
I’m tired, boss.
The "anti LLM" or "no AI" clause is really more a "covering all ass" clause.
If you want to improve Forgejo and have that AI PR; you better clean it up of all traces - resulting in a PR that is likely neat and going to be merged.
I see no issue with that. It simply enforces a pace and process that is very befitting and in my opinion mandatory for such a central system they're maintaining.
Banning any form of legal, libre software, shows that you are not floss friendly and I do not want to host my code with organizations like yours. I dropped sourcehut when they banned cryptocurrency software and today I drop you.
Looks like I'm going back to self-hosting and accepting patches via email.
> The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:
> > Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
This naive "rapid pace"...
Those who do in that careless "pace" will invest more time maintaining it, fixing it, supporting it, or well... realizing it, I believe.
Not to mention that they make themselves more and more dependent on some LLM vendor prospering these vendors with each iteration and tokens burned, and training their models on your own ideas, creativity, and your time of life. Yet, not a single person will guarantee a stable outcome, and no one to blame after. Is that "development"? That is dark horrific sorrow.
This "vibe coding" may be quick at starters, if lucky and all Gods and the Fortune got you, yet supporting that and investing your life time after?
No, never. I have my own mind to train. The people I work with have their own minds. The Communities out there have their own minds. We all have our mind to develop, and learn from each other. Otherwise, it’s empty, pointless, and not art you will be proud of as a developer who inscribes moments in the history, and stand your name in it.
The resource point is fair enough but as the blog post says they can make it a paid service for llm folks.
I think it's a bit an
My take: If ai generated the code, let ai pay for it, unless it has been proved worth it's upkeep. Basically, show me some sort of: AI code-gen proof of work (or proof of worth, some mechanism), then you're in.
Automation at ai-scale are very expensive, just look at the trillions of USD being spent by ai companies. And let's not forget, that the rest of us don't have those levels of funding. And neither do non-profits like Codeberg i'm guessing.
And some more, i'm not even considering security issues, where for instance ai code-gen turns on hosting/platform providers (similar to chapgpt incident on hugginfaces). even if the sandbox proves resilient, the code is parasitic in nature or behaves like a virus.
Now Codeberg is free to do as it wants as am I.
(Site's down for me)
I know the European scene since the 80th and know, that all projects are not what the rest of world think they are: free, and an alternative to anything that is US based.
European software devs are activists in the old-school meaning. In the 80th, they were crackers, hackers, and they looked for likeminded people. BTX scandal is only for very old veterans, as well as von Gravenreuth or Highscore.
I was part of the C64, Amiga scene and still have many friends their. Nevertheless we have very different attitudes today.
Without any irony I finally hope that people finally value that is provided by GitHub or other services from the Valley.
Trashing them or thinking, you just needed to host a service outside the US makes it a viable option is naiv.
I respect EU's and European devs' decisions, but I would never ever rely on them. I love the US and happy to be almost 100% not using European services.
Yes it reads "Software development, but free! Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort..." but you didn't know Germans or the fineprint. Codeberg is organized as "eingetragener Verein" and here you have the basis for what is considered free: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/en/bylaws....
Folks, this is politics, this is power struggle, this is what Germans call "Grabenkämpfe". If you aren't used to the lifestyle, you won't understand nor enjoy the ride.
I build an extremely successfully eV myself which still lives and thrives for 30 years now - without me.
Value GitHub, stay away from European "alternatives". They aren't.
Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.
To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?
I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?
Gitea is developed by a for-profit organisation while Forgejo is developed by a non-profit.
Ability for rug pull is much greater for gitea imo. Gitea (organisation) already develops non-foss software to sit on top of Gitea (software). Gitea requires copyright attributions for contributions so is more able to change the Gitea license to something non-free in the future.
Codeberg can make up whatever rules they want for their Forgjo instance but you can do what you like on your self-hosted instance so I dont think that the governance of codeberg should concerning for self-hosting.
If Forgejo somehow enshittified, I would expect a popular fork immediately. If Gitea enshittified, I expect most people who would have forked already went to forgejo
So I know of no technical reason why any should be better. And the potential for drama and conflict inherent in the developers of both projects make me wary. In the end I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.
In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.
> the only cOmMuNiTy [most free software projects] have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time not contributing in any form whatsoever
Reporting bugs is contributing. Especially when you emphasize "any form whatsoever".
That said, I broadly agree with the author. But I wonder if this attempt to discourage egregious AI slop will some day make Codeberg a more trustworthy or pleasant place than alternatives. Maybe it's not the right choice for OP (or me, for some projects), but it seems like a good thing for a sizeable forge to exist that has some strictness or selectiveness to it. Maybe the world doesn't need another one-size-fits-all platform like GitHub.
Codeberg might ironically become a boon to AI companies with this policy, as well, by effectively doing a bunch of curation work for them, if not by providing outright untainted training data.
Or the opposite, as the rules are you cannot use AI, all the attribution will be removed, but sure enough there still will be a bunch of AI written code there, people will just have an incentive to mask it instead. So it ends up being a place where AI/human code will be even harder to see the difference between, compared to GitHub, where people apparently have no shame in just attaching claude's username to their commits.
„ Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.
You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.“
I don't think this argument is reasonable at all. Many are concerned about the environmental and societal impacts of LLMs, there are many ethical concerns around them as well, there are concerns that they could cause a bubble burst / a major economical crisis. Regardless your opinion on all these things, that's quite the undertaking for "just a tool"! This is unheard of for something like a hammer, for instance.
> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same
Linus Torvalds can be wrong at times, like anyone else.
It's a shame an authority like Linus Torvalds shared this opinion, now people are taking it even more seriously.
He considers technical merit above all else, even above what allows "technique" to exist in the first place. He always have. It might have helped a lot in the success of Linux, but I still think this is deeply flawed.
Whether you love, or hate, or don't care about LLMs, they are not "just a tool".
The answer is building systems that prevent that power trip from ever happening. This is why Bluesky is a better answer to Twitter than Mastodon – the company has its faults, but the approach is a fundamental step forward that Mastodon did not take. The same thing is true of things like Tangled for a software forge. It's no surprise that both of these are based on ATProto, although I'm not saying ATProto is the only option here.
If your Mastodon admin goes rogue, you a) have to get your data out of their hands, and b) have to rebuild your Mastodon presence in a new location, all your connections, history, etc are gone. That's exactly the same problem that Twitter users faced.
On ATProto, you can self-host your data while still making use of Bluesky/etc, in a way that you can't do with Mastodon or even email. You can choose who your UI comes from and just switch UI and keep everything, you can switch who your moderators are and keep everything else, etc.
Check out Blacksky, they're doing amazing work running a whole separate ATProto system that is fully compatible with, and actually the same social network as Bluesky. You can transparently migrate, at a protocol level, something Mastodon/ActivityPub doesn't attempt to tackle.
I've done it, self hosted Mastodon limited my ability to participate in the social network in a way that it does not on ATProto.
Also you can't port between instances. Whereas this is fundamental to the ATProto ecosystem.
The argument is that with ActivityPub does not care about that aspect. With Mastodon, the database is under the control of whoever owns the server.
The rebuilding part is rather similar, but exporting the data is trivial with ATProto but depends on the admin with ActivityPub.
you mean Twitter -> Bluesky?
Mastodon seems to work as intended
The way most users use Bluesky is no different, but the protocol is different, and it is possible to not fall afoul of these issues – data is portable, you can choose your moderation, UI, algorithms, etc, all separately rather than being forced to take a whole package and lose control.
See Blacksky for a completely separate stack, governed separately, that is still fully compatible. That's not possible with Mastodon or even ActivityPub.
Apples to Oranges here. Linus has himself and the entirety of the Linux Foundation maintainers + outside contributors to effectively review and gatekeep llm slop from making into ONE codebase.
Codeberg has presumably way less people working for it than the Linux Foundation, and has to monitor an avalanche of codebases for slop. Of course they aren't going to be able to pull off what Linux can do.
Yes, and?
I don't want you wearing football shirts in my pub. People wearing football shirts tend to cause trouble because someone who likes a different colour sees the shirt and kicks off. Leave it outside my pub.
People need to understand that there's a difference between "You're not allowed to do that" and "You're not allowed to do that *here*, because this is my house and my rules".
And yeah, fighting against the worst that capitalism has to offer is a laudable fight. But LLMs, especially Chinese open weights ones offer powerful tools we can use in our fight, as aligned interests of socialists, communists, and anarchists.
Codeberg people who were permitted to vote (700 out of 70000 repo maintainers) instead decided to fight the proxy (llm) and not the actual horrible (capitalists). And of course, that battle is neatly impossible to even define externally. Its a game of purity whack-a-mole with Codeberg admins playing the SCOTUS obscenity game of "I'll know it when I see it".
Its still crazy how much energy bitcoin wastes, how much energy bitcoin steals.
Ironic enough, if you know wwere a bitcoin millionar is, its a lot easier to steal from them too.
Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.
>sh.tcoin
in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though
Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.
The cryptocurrency related projects ban is also insane knowing how much it has contributed to having greater crypto librairies, including all the newer zK stuff.
The entire planet is migrating towards AI coding, and Codeberg is going the opposite way, it's a sure way to die, let's speak about it in 2028 where I'm ready to bet that less than 0.1% of all software dev will be manually editing files.
To me, it seems that they can't manage their infrastructure properly cost wise and decide instead to punish the users for it.
1. You are not entitled to a website hosting your content. A website refusing to host you is not censorship in any form whatsoever.
2. I'm pretty positive they did this because of infrastructure reasons as a secondary reason to their mission. LLMs mean people can just pump out projects at light speed, and that costs money to both host and do things with on CI/CD. If you want that potentially to be lifted in the future, pay them so they are able to have that infrastructure.
It's already dangerous today to not review codebases by top models, how do you think that will be in 2028?
And yes, a simple combination of top models today in adversarial+loops... and only 20 subscriptions will do much better than Codeberg ($100K monthly token equivalent).
But sure, Codeberg can remain alive for all the legacy stuff, but imo the mentality is quite backward.
And again, what is the problem with a platform wanting to not be flooded with a bunch of low-quality code that gets abandoned after it's done what the creator wanted it to do? I keep seeing this claim of these models being better than "most" developers but have yet to see any actual statistics cited to back up this claim which makes me think it's all just vibes.
Anthropic isn't going away, even if they do, a lot will compete anyway, AI in a general sense will reach the point where our jobs as dev will be to prompt all day long and that's it. It's almost sure that we will keep having better models and tooling, right now every single month it's getting better and better, and on some aspects not just linearly.
the moment GPT-3.5 dropped, it was already not hard to picture literally what we do today, the "hmm what if THIS suddenly is actually accurate", and tomorrow, it will be all the pain points we currently have that are solved.
Genuinely, see the Bun porting? Imagine that is with a very "weak" model, weak tooling, weak hardware, now imagine that tomorrow, it will port it 50x faster, more performant, better consistency, docs, and virtually zero bugs: not hard to picture at all, it's what it will be imo in 1 year, 2 tops just if the current pace continue, that's not even accounting for the thousand of new companies coming, can we really say it's vibe trash when it outperforms humans?
Think of what's slowing you down today and why you aren't already a Bot typing non-stop and imagine those solved, now what?
I must add Kimi K3 as another example, nothing "wahou" with it in the sense that it was already a sure thing, it's so great to see it coming already, but it's also sure we will have Mythos 10 level open-source, open-weight in a few years, it won't be surprising I mean, it's just logical. We will also have Marvel-level movies done with a prompt.
PS: sorry it's all over the place and out of touch with the initial Codeberg thing