[bArray]

I don't think you want to store your source code in a place where they ban projects based on politics [1]:

> Allowing these projects is not a neutral stance; the effects to the environment are severe. The "DarkFi" (seemingly some crypto designed for criminals, citing an FBI director) project for example uses a "PoW blockchain" (per their readme). PoW (Proof-Of-Work) projects waste an astonishing amount of computational energy, with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands. This energy is almost always from fossil fuels, which directly contributes to greenhouse gas emissions and undermining any global efforts to fight climate change.

> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.

Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? What next? Maybe you can't store your simulation source there because it is deemed to resource intensive for the expected results? When did source code itself become dangerous?

It looks like we need more alternatives...

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184

[hogwasher]

I'd rather companies actually care (or even just care about seeming to care) about ethics, rather than only caring what makes the line go up the fastest, yes.

A company that treats ethics as optional, or that thinks "it's a business" excuses every imaginable sin, is one that will happily screw you and me over too.

Also, in the long term, making climate change worse is a catastrophically bad decision for absolutely everybody. Companies just have to look past the ends of their own noses to see the immediate, quick payout of not giving a fuck about it is like accepting payment to dig their own graves.

Also, this is probably, in part, about all the cryto scams everywhere. Companies don't like legal trouble.

Anyway, anybody who's sane backs up their source code. If a company burns you, and it's not a monopoly, you leave it. It's not a problem.

[bko]

I'd rather companies just provide me a service at a reasonable price. I don't need a corporation imposing it's ethics on me.

[inigyou]

Well this is a charity providing services for free. If you want to be provided a service for a price, go elsewhere.

[tarpitt]

That money had to have come from somewhere, whether it was taxpayers or individuals. What if I donated? Is it cool to just roll over and allow political groups to hijack a previously neutral service?

Also there are other projects hosted there, and network effects involved.

[inigyou]

Probably if you become a member you'll have more ability to discuss with the other members and the board and the operators, yes.

Clearly they are setting limits on a case-by-case basis where needed. If something like GNOME was on Codeberg, they'd happily raise the storage quota for them. So they can also exempt you from the AI code rule if you have a really good reason, which you don't.

They have noted somewhere (it's linked in this thread) that most vibe-coders act like they're big and valuable software projects (like GNOME), and use commensurate resources, even though they aren't. This is what they want to block. If you were actually GNOME and you were vibe-coding, they'd probably let you.

[inigyou]

that note I just referenced is here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

[Timon3]

This step perfectly aligns with the political direction Codeberg had from the very start. Who are you to now come in and demand they change to fit your political stance?

This isn't very cool of you.

[1shooner]

>What if I donated?

Then you would have been a supporting member, and had the opportunity to vote on this decision.

[CaptainFever]

What if I was an active member, and voted no?

[Blazara]

There is no such thing as a neutral service.

[insane_dreamer]

then pay for GitHub; Codeberg is free, for FOSS. You're not their target user.

[KptMarchewa]

Yet they bend under fascist requests like current US administration.

[inigyou]

Codeberg? Did they? I know large corporations do it because they fear commercial retaliation, but Codeberg is a registered German charity by German citizens living in Germany and has absolutely no reason to give a flying fuck what the US president thinks. Which is incredibly based.

[mlrtime]

The problem is they can change their mind at a whim and all of a sudden you are on the other side of what they care about.

Not worth the risk, I'd say don't use them.

[ModernMech]

Can't every company do that at any time though? How is being on the other side of an ethical line different or more risky from being on the other side of a spreadsheet-driven line. One day you're in a green cell and it's all good, the next you're in a red cell and on the other side of what they care about (just green cells).

[Blazara]

You're describing literally every organisation you could contribute to.

[Forgeties79]

And go where instead? GitHub?

[Oxodao]

host your own. Codeberg is literally based on Forgejo you can setup on your own

[jacooper]

Yes at least they don't do BS like this.

[jacooper]

The decision to stop hosting such projects on codeberg will change nothing, it will just make it clear that its not a serious competitor.

Its like how the EU kneecaps everything related to energy because of the climate while literally the best case scenarios for the EU lawa is to be 0.1 colder, because the EU isn't the bigger emitter. It just doesn't matter.

[AnthonyMouse]

The biggest problems with energy policy in the EU haven't been about climate. If they were they wouldn't have been shutting down nuclear to burn Russian gas, nor would they have been suffering the high prices when that Russian gas got less available.

Moreover, the EU is a large market. If they e.g. switch to electric cars, it's not just them switching to electric cars, it's all the carmakers who want to continue selling into that market, who in turn design electric rather than ICE cars that they sell everywhere and increase the economies of scale for battery production which makes them more economical everywhere.

[tripzilch]

> with Bitcoin alone using more energy than the entire countries of Argentina or the Netherlands

Btw this particular comparison can be traced back to a single Guardian article from 2021/2022 or so

It's a very weird comparison imho cause what they did (in the original article) was sort all the countries by energy usage, and notice that Bitcoin lies between Argentina and Netherlands. I thought a better comparison would be to consider that air condition uses 20x the amount of electricity globally compared to what Bitcoin uses. You can find a whole lot of other comparisons here: https://ccaf.io/cbnsi/cbeci/ghg/comparisons (the airco comparison is about halfway on the page).

Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does. It's still a lot of energy and proof-of-work does seem really wasteful. Fortunately not all crypto currencies use proof-of-work.

It's just ... it's a stupid comparison. it doesn't really make anything any clearer to the reader by knowing that the global energy usage of Bitcoin ranges between NL and Argentina.

Anyway, it's not wrong. it's just .. yeah it's a lot? I guess? a country is a lot? Is it just households or also the country's industry? Anyway.

My main point, however, is that quoting a ~4 year old piece of not-so-great journalism shows exactly how much original thought these people gave to the subject. They're basically repeating a line that hardly made sense 4 years ago.

Edit: BTW I want to add, they're giving away a service for free and therefore it's their good right to decide who gets it and who doesn't. And it's my good right to think those reasons are stupid.

[jacobjjacob]

The value of air conditioning is much more than 20x the value of bitcoin. It might be more than 20,000,000x the value.

[KetoManx64]

> Now I'm not trying to argue that bitcoin doesn't waste a lot of energy, it totally does.

Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain. The federal reserve (corrupt as it is) does not waste energy to print dollar bills, it is just part of the process of creation.

[inigyou]

That's not correct. The complaint isn't about data processing energy, it's about the energy purposely wasted in the "how much energy can I waste today" e-dick contest that gives you the right to print new bitcoins. Of course everyone is wasting as much energy as they can.

[AnthonyMouse]

It isn't "as much as they can", it's as much as is profitable. Which currently means that if you're paying more than about $0.08/kWh for electricity, it isn't profitable and there is no financial incentive to do it.

Of course, this means that people with access to cheap electricity still have the incentive to do it, but now who are they? Well, the places with the cheapest electricity fall into two categories. First, the ones like Iraq that heavily subsidize the cost of electricity, but those countries tend to ban cryptocurrency mining because their intention isn't to subsidize it and that's otherwise what they would be doing.

Second, the places with a large amount of hydro or renewable generation, which then have cheap electricity whenever the intermittent sources have high output. So for example, the country that does the most Bitcoin mining by a fair margin is the US, and the top US state for it is Texas, which despite its reputation actually uses significantly more renewable generation than both the US and world average.

Moreover, cryptocurrency mining instantaneously becomes unprofitable when the price of electricity increases, so when those places with a lot of renewable generation see a period of low output and increase the price because they have to switch on fossil fuel peaker plants instead, the Bitcoin miners immediately shut down because paying the higher prices would be losing money. But loads that disappear quickly in response to higher prices like that are exactly what you need to increase the amount of renewable generation in the grid. You have 1GW of Bitcoin miners and 1GW of ordinary consumers and you can use 2GW of solar generation without needing to backstop it with anything because when solar output is at 50% the price goes up some and the Bitcoin miners drop out until the clouds clear.

With the result that mining tends to happen using excess renewable generation and funds and supports the increase in renewables as a percentage of the grid.

[allarm]

> Bitcoin doesn't waste energy, it uses energy to encode and secure the blockchain.

Which is a waste of energy.

[KetoManx64]

You know what's a real waste of energy? The federal reserve increasing the money supply by 50% in the last half decade and inflated away the savings of hundreds of millions of people that spent tens of thousands of hours of their lives earning that money through blood, sweat and tears.

[AnthonyMouse]

Who is keeping significant savings as cash in a mattress? Anyone holding investment assets sees nominal asset prices increase along with inflation.

The thing that really screws them is that the government calls the nominal but not real asset price increase a capital gain and wants to collect tax on it.

[allarm]

I see no contradiction here.

[bramhaag]

> Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine?

No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

[spacechild1]

That is actually a great blog post! I wholeheartedly agree with the points they are making.

[bArray]

The core argument they are making is one of resources, I can find myself seeing their point. Another abuse of the service would be to convert videos into ASCII text and check them into git, for example.

The issue with the crypto argument is that it is purely political, it is not affecting the service at all. You may think that you agree because it happens to align with your political sentiment, but it's entirely possible they come for your projects next.

[NetOpWibby]

They really quoted the FBI Director in their reasoning? Unserious people.

Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed for criminals.”

EDIT: This person echoes my sentiment completely; https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...

[28304283409234]

If you avoid the discussion, you never get anywhere. Kudos to Codeberg for taking position.

[bravetraveler]

Or as Poppa liked to remind me, if you don't stand for something (of your choosing)... you'll stand for anything. Kudos to Codeberg, indeed.

What's more... why aim for a single perfect 'remote'; they're literally free. Be selfish: find several that suit your interests.

[NotGMan]

The problem with imposing ethics is that, in the future, they might change their views or mark other political problems as verboten.

No serious business or open source project can be built or such shifting sands.

[sunshine-o]

Yes if you compare a proof of stake blockchains (most of them) and the banking industry, crypto has a far smaller environmental footprint.

Ethereum (since PoS) was designed to allow anybody to run a validator or even a full node out of modest hardware. The result is that the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank.

[curiousObject]

>the entire network probably has a smaller footprint than a single small/medium size bank

What research or statistics can you suggest to bolster this argument?

[tripzilch]

While I can't confirm comparisons to a "small/medium size bank" specifically (cause I have no idea how), I can perhaps clarify a bit

Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.

Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.

As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.

[dlubarov]

There isn't really a technical difference that made PoS viable for Ethereum but not Bitcoin; it's a hard fork in either case. The differences are more cultural -

- For better or worse, Ethereum has more centralized leadership (mainly the EF) which helps coordinate upgrades. Hard forks happen pretty regularly, and don't typically risk fracturing the community, unless the changes are particularly controversial (see Ethereum Classic).

- PoS wasn't that controversial, since it was planned from the beginning (see the difficulty bomb). Some users still resisted the switch - see the EthereumPoW fork - but for the most part the community was on board.

- The Bitcoin community OTOH values ossification. It rarely accepts proposed hard forks as "still Bitcoin"; that has only happened a few times in its history. The community's response to most proposed hard forks is "interesting, but that's not Bitcoin, call it something else."

- The Bitcoin community is also more ideologically and economically invested in PoW, so a proposed PoS fork would be extremely controversial, and would fracture the community (at best, if it gained any traction at all).

[Ferret7446]

The centralization and PoS makes Ethereum unsafe. What's the point of moving from a currency that a government can unilaterally control to a currency that the Ethereum board/stakers can unilaterally control?

The point of PoW is that it resists monopolization unlike PoS.

[dlubarov]

The centralized leadership has no hard power though; the community normally goes along with changes they propose because they're normally sensible. If they go rogue, people will stop following their proposals.

In Vitalik's words: "If someone puts a gun to my head and tells me to write a hard-fork patch, I will definitely write it. If I publish a patch to delete a bunch of accounts, how many people here would download and install the update and switch to that chain? I see relatively few raised hands. This is called decentralization"

[exo762]

PoW is trivial to control in its' today form. When the network hash power is dominated by three players, you know every address you need to pay a visit.

[sunshine-o]

There are about 8k validators [0].

Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.

Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.

Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".

Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.

- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/

[surgical_fire]

Are we going to pretend that hosting open sourse software for free is an apolitical thing?

Neutrality itself is very political. You may prefer it, and that is fine; sometimes I prefer it as well.

But within the confined of the law, it should be a non-issue that a free service is not neutral.

To be frank, I think that the majority of people screeching about Codeberg here are totally fine with "right to refuse service" when it comes to businesses (as if that was not political at all).

[qwm]

Not the biggest fan of crypto myself, but allowing LLMs and "AI" stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They should just say they don't like crypto at that point, because LLMs and datacenters for them are causing way more harm. Even if their qualms are fraud and abuse, I have some bad news for them about what people are using LLMs for lol

[no-name-here]

> allowing LLMs and “AI” stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious.

They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...

[selfmodruntime]

I'm out. No place that has ever publicly advertised itself to be "political" has ever changed for the beter.

[zombot]

Companies chasing profitmaxxing (to use a fashionable pattern) are just as political, do you complain about those too? Anyway, the answer is the same here: If you don't like it, just don't use them.

[insane_dreamer]

I'd say Microsoft is pretty political. But you're welcome to continue using Github. No one's asking you to host your FOSS projects (for free) on Codeberg.

[21asdffdsa12]

A million scammers forked around and found out - and to ban that is politics?

At least you went straight to whataboutisms - instead of introspection. "Why cant we have the sweets, the others are getting-" instead of "Why did we built something that allows the worst of human nature to run rampant- and how could we do better"..