Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by somnium_sn 5 days ago
It is fine to have corners of the internet that run in a particular way.

My issue however, is that this is changing the rules on people. Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github. Now it's more narrow, an alternative to Github and only for people who don't want to use AI. What's the next step? This is the problem, you either a platform and be, within legal reasons, agnostic, or you are trying to be a specific community. It is unclear to me if the specific community that Codeberg wants to be today will be the one it wants to be in a year from now, because clearly it's changing.

I cannot rely on a service provider that does change that quickly.

4 comments

> Codeberg initially was a FLOSS alternative to big company Github

Codeberg never was a full alternative to Github. From the start it's been an open platform, run by European non-profit, exclusively for Free and Open Source projects. I see the recent changes to be inline with their initial values and community they want to foster.

Codeberg always limited private repositories since its inception. They were never set out to replace GitHub/GitLab.

As the other commenter said, they didn't change their values and target.

Also, these changes are enacted by members of the e.V. Nobody is forcing them to do something. It's all public and transparent.

Yeah, they are setting up a capricious environment which is hard to avoid with rules like this.

In the blog post they complain about AI-assisted projects being too polished, using CI resources even though it's a one-man project with zero users. (Reasons they don't give for banning it in the TOS)

So, what's the rule exactly? Can I set up release builds on my one-man project or not? What about when the clearly vibe-coded project does it, do I report them? Does everyone just remember to not check in their AGENTS.md when pushing to codeberg?

I think things should just cost money. Far better than a nonsensical honor system around LLMs which has the obvious outcome of hiding LLM use.

That said, they can foster what ever environment they want. I think it's just a regressive self-limiting view that tries to pretend like the world isn't changing with rules that have bad downstream outcomes, as opposed to a platform that accepts reality and figures out what to do from there. And I find that disappointing.

I kind of like the idea of a software forge that won't host the Torment Nexus discovered in 2027 because its TOS didn't contain language about it in 2026.