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Codeberg Divides

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Re: Codeberg Divides

#61

Post by lowsong »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #57
squigz wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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 n…

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...

Re: Codeberg Divides

#62

Post by aliasxneo »

lowsong wrote: post #61
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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 en…

This is basically the argument I've seen over and over again from the Codeberg community. Boo hoo, you misunderstood the writing on the wall and now you're stuck doing a bunch of work. Goodbye.

I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so hard to show a little understanding and compassion.

Re: Codeberg Divides

#63

Post by free_bip »

aliasxneo wrote: post #60
free_bip wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Crypt…

> 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 s…

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.

Re: Codeberg Divides

#64

Post by aliasxneo »

free_bip wrote: post #63
aliasxneo wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

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 r…

> 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.

Re: Codeberg Divides

#65

Post by cge »

free_bip wrote: post #27
aliasxneo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 g…

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 peop…

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.)

Re: Codeberg Divides

#66

Post by kakonako »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #19

Agree substantially here, as I said elsewhere: the honest and respectful answer from the Codeberg community would have been: add resource limits, quotas, and a reviewed application form for new projects. And maybe a statement that: Pre-existing clearly "vibe coded" projects providing little value to the community may be subject to review. Our resources are limited. Don't abuse them. Instead it got framed in moralisti…

> Frankly if there's anywhere where I would most like to see AI generated work -- which is frankly based on weights generated from the broad and indiscriminate harvesting of other people's works -- is in copylefted software that takes the distillations of the efforts of the community and makes it available as free software with free software protections.

I agree wholeheartedly with this. We have large corporations stealing work left right and center. Lets utilise that to our benefit and make open and free versions of all software. The crux is that to do that each individual has to pay currency to use this tool. Maybe there is a place for collectives to collect money and to utilise llms to free software. (What strange times we live in.)

A slight aside, open source lived and breathed the idea of ownership of software, be that a council, a handful of committed maintainers, a BDFL and all things in between and adjacent. There isn't really much wrong with "vibe coded" software, the issue seems to be owning that software. Things feels fundamentally more fluid, based on specs and more importantly tests that actually define the features that the software is expected to perform. Not ownership, but more like a contract.

Re: Codeberg Divides

#67

Post by dang »

neogodless wrote: post #17

Related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs (blog.codeberg.org) 1 day ago, 144 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 Codeberg bans vibe coded projects (codeberg.org/codeberg) 2 days ago, 279 comments

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

Ah, the Codeberg Drama - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49034928 - July 2026 (51 comments)

I regret migrating to Codeberg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49021856 - July 2026 (474 comments)

Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015635 - July 2026 (144 comments)

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49015588 - July 2026 (638 comments)

Codeberg: ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465 - July 2026 (77 comments)

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386 - July 2026 (279 comments)

Re: Codeberg Divides

#68

Post by johnfn »

aliasxneo wrote: post #52
johnfn wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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 :-)

Re: Codeberg Divides

#69

Post by lowsong »

aliasxneo wrote: post #62
lowsong wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 en…

This is basically the argument I've seen over and over again from the Codeberg community. Boo hoo, you misunderstood the writing on the wall and now you're stuck doing a bunch of work. Goodbye. I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so…

    I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue
What "sort of dialogue" are you referring to?

Re: Codeberg Divides

#70

Post by kps »

Aurornis wrote: post #42
free_bip wrote: post #21

I think this move by Codeberg is lowkey genius. They're trying to build a community based on a set of shared values. Those who disagree with those values are now self-selecting out of the Codeberg community, which is exactly the point of passing these kinds of resolutions. The fact that the rule is open for interpretation means that they can effectively shut down malicious actors (i.e those who intentionally misrepre…

I’ve seen so many variations of this where a community starts adding more rules that are open to judgment. Removing the obvious rule breakers looks like an easy win at first. Then over time the list of rules grows. Small groups become good at navigating the rule making process and getting changes pushed through. Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making proc…

>Before you know it, small groups of highly invested people are wielding the rules and the rule making process against their enemies or competitors.

Now that you mention it, Wikipedia also has a policy against LLM contributions.

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