I don't really see a problem with this decision (or the one regarding crypto), they were voted on by the active members of Codeberg, simply a democratic outcome.
I had a somewhat active GPL/copylefted project on there for 11 months, but I didn't even see a point in signing up as "community member" to become a part of the registered voting community in order to vote ... because from reading the threads around this it was already an indiscriminate pile-on of moralism and judgement and it was clear where things were going to go from day one.
Any voices that said anything on the PR or on threads about it on Mastodon even ask for clarifications on where the limits etc were intended to be were immediately attacked and shut down in a black and white way... It was very clear where it was going to go and there was zero nuance to the discussion. The "community" shouted out anybody who would have voted against this.
I got ready to pull my project the moment I saw all that going down, and just waited to pull the trigger til the day it passed.
It's their right to narrow their definition of community on this basis. I also think the way they did it is crude, lacks nuance, and was executed poorly.
I'm sure my project probably would not have fallen afoul of their judgements.
I hosted my own CI in part because I didn't want to suck up their resources. I was by no means producing "slop" -- I'm a software engineer with a 30 year career and capable of engineering judgement. I'm also long time open source user and contributor, an advocate of copyleft licensing, have my own critical opinions about aspects of LLM usage, and wanted off GH because I saw a lot of ... evil.. there and wanted to not be reliant on American infrastructure among other things.
But... I like probably the majority of authors of large packages these days, use AI tooling as do my contributors. And parts of my project have hooks to use open weight models, and provide MCP etc. hooks, and so on.
Having seen the type of discussion both on the PR and on Mastodon, I felt no desire to have these particular people holding open judgement over me and my project. [Aside: I'm fairly certain someone has gone through the PR that proposed the ban and removed egregious comments ... there are some comments missing that were formerly there, wish I had archived them]
Or here, when someone tried to ask for similar clarification: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912"You're coming off similar to someone trying to probe the limits of consent instead of trying to honor the request in good faith. It's a bad look.""Opening your conversation with a group by saying "well I'll get to violate your group's values a _little_, right?" does not project the mentality of someone who wants to collaborate in good faith."
Comparing AI usage or questions about it to rape culture or violating consent is absolutely repulsive and trivializes the latter and exaggerates the former.
Or making analogies to Claude Code users being NAZIs? "@piggo @tante I see such a rule as being similar to the "no Nazis" rule. It works by Nazi sympathizers self-identifying by arguing about the rule."
Pre-defining an in-group or out-group based on how contaminated they are by the tools they use... I'm sorry, it's ridiculous. And not in the slightest "democratic" even if it holds a formal vote.
It's possible that nuance would prevail when the people sitting in judgement over things happened to look at my project. The actual public blog post seems going out of its way to provide a bit of "don't worry" ... but none of that was provided before. And I felt no need to be under that microscope.
... and so then the flood of "good riddance, so glad we got rid of people like you" comments... and people ritually going through my other comments to downvote me, blah blah. It's all the hallmarks of an angry echo chamber.
I posted this elsewhere about the kind of un-dialectical purity-of-essence thinking I saw on display:
[I fear] Blunt purity tests administered by people with reductionist and categorical thinking.
The reality is that even tools produced by concentrated capital and mass appropriation can also increase the productive capacity of a small free-software project whose code remains available under copyleft. They're not "infected" and contagious. They're tools.
They can deskill and dispossess workers; they can extend what a particular worker is able to make. Which tendency dominates, under what conditions, and to whose benefit are material questions.
"AI bad" is not an answer to them, any more than tech-bro "innovation good" is.
There is no winning with this type of perpetually online activist. It is the moral prerogative of any open source project that wishes to achieve any success in the real world to gatekeep these sort of purity testers out. Thankfully, Mastodon has been invented as a containment zone.
I respect that you tried to argue with people so bound to black and white thinking that they have the need to filter out anyone with any ambivalence or diverging opinion that they are creating a closely monitored and moderated filter bubble at all. I'm just staying miles away from those codeberg, gitea, fediverse people. Sad and not beneficial to democracy, but why bother?
I think those people are trying to say that if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that. Unless the point of the project is to exactly balance at 50% AI code, then you know whether you're vibecoding or regular-coding.
Their comparison was to a no-Nazis rule, not to Nazis. That comparison works. Only vibecoders argue about the intricacies of a no-vibecoding rule, just like only Nazis argue about the intricacies of a no-Nazis rule. They aren't saying vibecoders are Nazis, they're saying both vibecoders and Nazis are dishonest and try to find loopholes in the rules and accidentally identify themselves by doing that. The people who argue about age of consent also do that, which is why the person mentioned rape.
The point is that the comparisons used in both cases are absolutely inappropriate. I never said they were saying vibecoders are Nazis or rapists. I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.
More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Like, it's clear many people in this community see themselves as violated in some sense by the actions of American AI companies. The emotional response is legitimate. Transitioning from that emotion to indiscriminate policy is not, and making comparisons like that in a public forum is distasteful.
As for "if someone doesn't know whether their project is mostly AI-written, they're an idiot or lying. Nobody doesn't know that" -- that is not the question. The question is the precise definitions of what "AI-written" means, because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island. Because like it or not based on your moral principles -- vast amounts of people are using these tools now. I can't say a majority because I don't have the numbers but it would absolutely not surprise me. And I can guarantee a large number of projects on codeberg use(d) them. So clarify in advance of the policy passing what the policy will be. Instead the language was left ambiguous so they could choose to exercise personal judgement.
Calling them stupid or dishonest is a dick move. People legitimately wanted to know.
> I'm saying using those as analogous/similar comparison points displays an absolutely bonkers lack of decorum, nuanced thinking, or "democratic" behaviour and also trivializes those actually horrendous cases.
Are they correct? That should be the most important thing.
> More worrisome is I saw this same set of comparisons made over and over in multiple threads.
Maybe because they're correct
> because people legitimately wanted to know if their projects were going to be voted off the island.
Thus outing themselves as AI projects. Nobody with a non-AI project doesn't know that it's non-AI.
Good grief. The question is simply "what is vibecoding?" You're taking the position (without saying so) that any use of AI in coding is banned: from Cursor autocomplete to full omp harness chugging with Fable, whether or not the person has taken decades to learn coding, whether or not the code was reviewed professionally.
I suspect the reason you're not saying this is because when you write it out, it's obviously a policy rooted in simplistic thinking, similar to "We won't host code if it was written in Emacs" or "We won't host code if it uses spaces instead of tabs."
Ridiculous. Any liability is solved through the terms and conditions, where the uploader is held responsible. The uploader solves this, by holding the AI company responsible.
I couldn't care less about if AI was used to develop software, if it does what it is supposed to do, and if it is secure. Bad software can be produced with or without AI, so ultimately it is up to _you_ to vet the software you use if you don't pay anything for it.
This is all reasonable.
I will have to move my projects off Codeberg, but that's okay. We have incompatible views. No grudges.