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Comment by rwz | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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.

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I swear HN has some sort of Mandela effect about Codeberg's mission. Their website clearly states they're a community-led non-profit that hosts like-minded FOSS projects, and their FAQ directly asks you to host private repos somewhere else.

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.

Do yourself a favor and look at the actual HN thread [1] when Codeberg was widely discussed for the first time. It is crystal clear that Codeberg was seen as a direct alternative to GitHub at that time, and even the founder's quoted statement gave a nod to that I think?

> [...] 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.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22795930

I just did, in fact I vaguely remembered it from back then, and after reading the announcement blog post and the quote, I still think that anyone who expected Codeberg to replace their private use of GitHub was fantasizing. They already stated their mission is to be a community-led forge for FOSS.

Maybe we could blame them for having lowered their ambitions around "lesser" FOSS, but then again the economics are changing.

Even looking at the comments from that thread and the Codeberg page at that time in archive.org, I don't really see much that points to it as a proper GitHub alternative, other than the editorialized (I think) post title.

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.

What even is a "GitHub alternative"? By starting the discussion from an existing product instead of one's actual needs, one has already lost.

That thread is from 2020.

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.

The OP said the Mandela effect [1] which is definitely about the past event. Anyhow, I'm okay with Codeberg's decision (I'm not even its stakeholder, so what can I say about that anyway) but it has to be honest about the intent. If its definition of "F/OSS" has changed, do say so.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_memory#Mandela_effect

> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative

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.

>> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative

> 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/

Nothing in that quote suggests that it's an "almost drop-in" replacement for Github.

As an illustrative example: Proton is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement.

I'm genuinely confused by how often people make up something in their mind, get upset about it, and then angrily post an attack on the thing they made up in their mind. How does that happen? Aren't there enough upsetting real-world things already?

Can you point me at the posts where Codeberg was suggesting this? I just ran a quick search of Codeberg-related HN posts from the last year, and while there are some instances of "why I moved my stuff to Codeberg" I wasn't able to find anything from the platform begging people to move. I believe you there could be examples, but that doesn't seem to be representative of the discussion.

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.

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