[aliasxneo]

Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

[free_bip]

You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.

Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable?

Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules?

If not one of the two, what is the reason?

The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.

[aliasxneo]

> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.

Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened.

This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.

[inigyou]

So it sounds like you're treating Codeberg as a neutral git host. They've made it clear they don't want to be that, they are a charity association that supports free software development by providing free software developers with services like git hosting. They are not wasting their services on people who don't align with the mission.

[free_bip]

That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed.

And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be.

Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.

[aliasxneo]

> That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated?

I started with a hypothetical. Then I used an actual real-world example. I have 100+ repos on GitHub spanning a wide array of technologies. If I moved all 100+ over, how do I know I won't fall afoul of whatever the community votes to ban next?

The point is Codeberg isn't a good fit for my situation which needs more continuity and less surprises, and that's been made readily apparent now. So I'm leaving, just like many other people who have been posting about it.

[free_bip]

Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

If the reason is more emotional than rational ("this feels like it's going to change more"), that's okay. Not everything needs to be governed by rigid rules. The Codeberg community knows that well. If in a few years your 100+ repos are still all fine and dandy to their rule set I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.

[aliasxneo]

> Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any.

Unfortunately you can't make that decision. I have to wait and find out how far the ToS violation will be implemented. Or I just avoid that stress and go somewhere else. Most people being affected seem to be choosing the latter.

> If the reason is more emotional than rational

That's a bit reductive. Risk management always has a level of uncertainty involved. No one makes decisions with 100% certainty in the outcome. Before these votes, I had a certain level of risk assessment in moving off Github To Codeberg that favored Codeberg. Now that situation has changed. It's not "emotional" to recognize that.

[mariusor]

Have you considered actually asking someone at Codeberg about your cryptography project?

[theshrike79]

Who would one ask to get an official and enforceable answer?

I don’t want an opinion, I need a definitive ruling I can trust.

[warkdarrior]

Is this the "contact our sales team for pricing" of open source?

[cge]

>And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed).

Looking at community conversations, there actually seems to be little clarity over this, and quite a bit of confusion. Several established members of the community seem to be saying that the ToS actually only bans "cryptocurrency related projects" that "[harm] the reputation of Codeberg", and that direct cryptocurrency projects that don't harm Codeberg's reputation are actually allowed, saying that the current banner is a mistake and is in the process of being changed (while they have their own systems and are not on Codeberg, I'm guessing GNU Taler might be an example of a cryptocurrency project that would be allowed). In fact, this appears to be within the official interpretation used when locking the discussion thread on the change ([1] refers to [2]).

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19... [2] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19...

[johnfn]

I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.

[aliasxneo]

I really don't understand the argument, to be honest. If somebody is participating in something with a perceived expectation, and then that expectation gets contradicted not once, but twice, why is it unreasonable to assume it might happen again? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely don't understand the line of thinking.

[johnfn]

I think I agree with you, so maybe you meant to ask someone else? Or you’re just supporting my argument, in which case I appreciate it :-)

[card_zero]

If they have a coherent set of values, then that's why. Then you have a theory of mind about the admins, and they weren't behaving erratically, but it was your original expectations that were incorrect.

[no-name-here]

Codeberg has existed since 2018. Was it clear to you a few years ago that things like 1) projects tied to AI, 2) mostly AI code, and 3) crypto would be banned? If not, then what makes you believe you now know their future actions if you didn’t before?

[Lerc]

If you consider the argument of the comment at the top, that those who disagree with banning will leave. It would seem that you could expect an acceleration.

I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands.

No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.

[nmz]

They won't. No company will, I think the best quote I've heard this week is from the proton CEO on the Decoder podcast.

"No company is going to jail for you."

If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.

[mcv]

Codeberg is not a company. Also, we're not talking about jail. We're talking about principles.

[no-name-here]

> No company is going to jail for you.

Are you arguing a Codeberg member had a legitimate fear of being jailed for hosting others’ AI code? And GitHub/all other hosters should have the same legitimate fear of being jailed a long as they don’t ban the same? Or is this more of a straw man? Or were you bringing up that quote to point out that those trying to defend Codeberg are using completely fabricated arguments?

[cge]

Honestly, for me, both.

While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).

But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.

Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.

And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.

(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)

[yuriks]

My read of the "side projects and experiments" part of the blog post is that, in the context of LLM projects, if your project does not use resources and isn't looking to attract a community then, if only due to the practicalities of moderation/enforcement, they're unlikely to take any action against it because it won't be visible or causing enough problems.

[cge]

Asking about this, it seems like that might be the case: they likely intended the "even if they were not LLM-generated" to be counterfactual. It's an unfortunate place to leave such grammatical ambiguity.

[mcv]

Is it not obvious? They've just done it. They've excluded people based on new rules, and not everybody was expecting those new rules.

Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.

[p2detar]

> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that?

I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote:

> The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.

[kalleboo]

Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?

[aliasxneo]

Did it get much attention? I don't know of a single person who finds value in LLM generated comments on social platforms. The fact that Codeberg is getting attention for this move is likely because it alienated a part of the community that was previously engaging, enough to generate constructive responses. I didn't see the same thing happening with this HN change.

[ThrowawayR2]

> "Did it get much attention?

4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

[aliasxneo]

Interesting. Two things stand out to me:

1. dang specifically posted a comment saying the rule has been around for _years_ [1]

2. I browsed the top upvoted comments and they seem to almost universally lean towards this being a good thing.

That's about what I would of expected. Although the "being around for years" thing was news to me and doesn't really make the OP's argument a good comparison for Codeberg's case.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341726

[bastawhiz]

> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow

This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.

[saghm]

Yes, and the baseline amount of trust seems to be substantially reduced for Codeberg for a lot of people in the wake of this change relative to most of the other options. I don't even necessarily think the new policy is bad in a vacuum, but if the strongest argument for why you can trust a service is "well can you really trust anyone 100%?", it's hard not to be a little wary.

Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?

[skydhash]

It does exists for any bank. Where I'm at, the assurance is given by the national bank, not the individual banks. Anything else is just probability and marketing.

In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.

[saghm]

> It does exists for any bank.

No one is disputing the existence of the question.

> In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later.

Okay, so then, what actually is the banning process? The recent changes sound like the banning process has been expanded to cover a lot of new things that it didn't before, and stating "well anyone can ban you" isn't particularly helpful information, which was the point I was making.

[skydhash]

> The recent changes sound like the banning process has been expanded to cover a lot of new things that it didn't before

This is the actual part of the TOS

  Please be aware that this list is neither exhaustive nor complete (illustrating the spirit of the law, not its letter). Be aware that any account can get suspended at any time if it is used for activities harming Codeberg e.V. or its associated platform and services, directly or indirectly, even if these activities are not explicitly listed in the examples above.

So anything goes. The actual list contains stuff that are going to get you expulsed for sure. But there’s nothing that guarantees your ability to host for a certain period of time.

So your best bets is to keep backups of your data soemwhere else. Which you should always be doing.

[saghm]

> So your best bets is to keep backups of your data soemwhere else. Which you should always be doing.

Generally backing up a git repo is easy; it's all of the other stuff that tends to get hosted together with the code (issue tracking, pull requests, releases, potentially even CI) that's a lot worse to have to migrate over. Plus, anywhere a link was published to the repo is going to point to something that no longer exists.

It actually sounds like we're in agreement for the most part about the relative levels of risk here. I misunderstood your earlier reply to me as a rebuttal to what I was saying to the parent commenter, but from re-reading it I'm realizing I might have inferred incorrectly.

[lowsong]

    I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

What "shadow group" would that be? The paying members of Codeberg e.V. who voted to pass this motion?

[squigz]

And also like... this is how literally any community works? You "invest your free time" in it, then you do something that goes against the values of that community... yeah, of course that big bad "shadow group" (in other words, the admins/moderators) is going to do something.

[cmrdporcupine]

The point is that the stated values of said group changed.

[squigz]

Yes, this happens with most communities. It's called growth.

As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines:

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?

[cmrdporcupine]

It's not analogous at all. I moved my project to codeberg because the values were one way, and GitHub didn't match my values. I pour my heart and soul and time into my project. I also used AI tooling in a fashion as I saw fit. Now I'm reading I'm not welcome -- retroactively -- because I touched "bad" tools.

So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done.

An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.

[kstrauser]

I'm with you on this. I started moving projects to Codeberg when my understanding of the rules was that it was friendly to FOSS projects. Now it's explicitly unfriendly to a set of FOSS projects (albeit of a kind that I didn't participate in anyway) and users who use a particular kind of tool while working on their otherwise OK FOSS projects.

Now you can have a perfectly legal GPL-licensed project that's not welcome because of the category it finds into or because of its devs' tooling. It's their site and their rules, sure, fine, but it does mean I'm not going to host my policy-compliant projects there. Are they going to get banned next month? Who knows.

[lowsong]

To be blunt, I think you may have misunderstood the values to begin with. A motion being passed by a majority is a lagging indicator to the values of the membership, so if they changed they will have changed a long time ago.

The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:

    If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
    Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.

I don't even use Codeberg, and I've understood it was at best wary of AI for years. This shouldn't have come as a shock to you.

[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-a...

[bigbuppo]

The values didn't change, they just made them clear.

[nmz]

1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it.

2. Slippery slope fallacy.

3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2

[pooploop64]

Did you know GitHub removes things they deem to be malware? Malware is a very subjective classification, so who watches the watchmen? How do we know they won't start removing things that are deemed harmful just for competing with Microsoft products? Hell, letting them have a mechanism to moderate the site's content at all is a huge risk to society's freedom and continued existence. Aliens could arrive any time and shoot mind control beams at the GitHub admins which compel them to delete everything at once. The only way to prevent the future holocaust is if I'm allowed to typo squat GitHub repos to distribute viruses and someone else has to pay for it. If it's not safe for me to do that, GitHub is not safe for anyone.

[jujube3]

Removing malware or illegal content is very different than removing things for political reasons.

[anonymous_user9]

What is and isn't illegal is the very definition of political

[jujube3]

Generally following the law in the country you're located in is not considered a highly political act.