I was recently considering moving to Sourcehut or Github after self hosting using gitrc for over a year. I have been going back and forth over self hosting versus leveraging an existing service, but this news and fumblings over Gitea last week have pretty much put me right back into self hosting..
SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
101–110 of 279 posts
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#102A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects. Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation. The fac…
> A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform
Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's subjective. For us, it's a question of social impact. Sure, torrenting copyrighted material is illegal, but what's the actual social consequence of it? Little to none. Bittorrent also has a wealth of legitimate use-cases. For cryptocurrency, this is not the case: the social impact is grave, and there are few to no legitimate use-cases for it.
It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres... ) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem…
To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive.
Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test.
That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#104Just another company to avoid at all cost.
Today its cryptocurrency and most people probably aren't affected (and thus dont care but they should). Tomorrow it is whatever the people in charge dont like with no way to know what they might not like in the future. It could be anything, File sharing, gaming, something political, something religious, something containing unwanted words, a project maintained by Russians... who knows.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
Turning on shuttered gas and coal plants solely to mine cryptocurrencies is about as close as you can get to pointlessly cooking the planet. The benefits have been relatively modest so far.
Sounds like you have a problem with fossil fuels.
Yes, and thereby those that cause them to keep running (e.g., Bitcoin miners).
If we had abundant clean energy everywhere with no unclean power plants, then knock yourself dead. But right now, any power consumed has an unclean component.
Even if you use power in a country that is 100% renewable, it takes away power from a grid that is then replaced by non-renewable energy. And that these miners buy old crap power plants make it worse - it reverses grid-wide improvements to green energy.
... heck even with fully renewable energy for the entire globe, wastefully burning energy so that more renewable power sources need to be deployed is still bad - no power plant is neutral to manufacture.
And re: comparison to call of duty, if had the same footprint as Bitcoin, then we could start talking. Bitcoin consumes power like a small country, not like someone forgetting to turn off the lights. All for something that can be done without any of this power draw.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
Indeed I do. I have problems with lots of things, as most people do.
What makes securing hundreds of billions of people's money a less valid use of fossil fuels than playing Call of Duty?
For one, quantity: video games don’t use as much electricity, and those that do aren’t incentivizing reactivation of old fossil fuel plants.
For another, necessity: we have a preexisting financial system that secures orders of magnitude more value than cryptocurrencies do, with actual legal guarantees and recourses.
For a final, civic harm: whatever limited negative social ills can be explained by video games are dwarfed by the civic poison of fraud and “easy” money.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#107A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects. Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation. The fac…
> A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
At that point it would be nonfree, a huge step to take
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#108A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects. Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation. The fac…
> A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
Sourcehut is licensed under AGPL. It's free and open source software, you don't need permission. Even if the licensing were changed (something I view as extremely unlikely, since it would affect non-crypto customers as well), you can legally take an older snapshot of the code that is licensed under AGPL.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#109I don't work on cryptocurrency projects but this arbitrary decision doesn't instill confidence in sourcehut. Very little upside, huge potential downside. Strange business decision. Aren't your users there because they prefer "freedom"?
People use SourceHut for a wide variety of reasons. One of them is confidence in our strong moral compass and our willingness to make the right choices even if it could impact our profit, as contrasted with typical VC-funded operations in the market. I've never really heard anyone talk about SourceHut offering particularly more or less "freedom" than anyone else.
With all due respect, I do not care about your moral compass.
I want the predictability that as long as I am not breaking the law, my data can be safely hosted. Am I supposed to now pay attention to law and the countless individual moral compasses of people/vendors I interact with?
Moral compasses are tricky, some people let them run amok, and end up infecting computers with revenge-ransomware just for having their system language set to Russian, as it happened in March 2022. Was that also justified for the "greater good" of humanity?
Of course, it's your project, your service... anybody can fork it or self-host it, but this only screams at me: "be wary of this guy and his services, you could be next".
PS: I do not maintain cryptocurrency projects or trade any.
Re: SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
Proof of work isn't "cooking the planet". Get a grip. And Bitcoin is a fantastic benefit for humanity resulting from proof of work.
It's wasting huge amounts of precious resources, often from buying out old, unclean and otherwise decommissioned powerplants to make it extra bad. All with no immediate benefit. Even if Bitcoin was Proof of Stake, it's still a pretty "eh" technology. The best thing that happened to Bitcoin was when it got banned in China so that the mining capacity was vastly reduced, taking part of the environmental footprint with i…
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