> the only cOmMuNiTy [most free software projects] have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time not contributing in any form whatsoever
Reporting bugs is contributing. Especially when you emphasize "any form whatsoever".
That said, I broadly agree with the author. But I wonder if this attempt to discourage egregious AI slop will some day make Codeberg a more trustworthy or pleasant place than alternatives. Maybe it's not the right choice for OP (or me, for some projects), but it seems like a good thing for a sizeable forge to exist that has some strictness or selectiveness to it. Maybe the world doesn't need another one-size-fits-all platform like GitHub.
Codeberg might ironically become a boon to AI companies with this policy, as well, by effectively doing a bunch of curation work for them, if not by providing outright untainted training data.
If you click to another tab, the site changes its title and favicon to a random webpage like:
- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube
- Amazon.com: waifu pillow
When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):
> A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host deciding which projects are welcome worries
But, wait, Codeberg always had limitations on what projects are hosted there??? This been very explicit from the start, it's for FOSS and anything outside of that isn't welcome. It's one of the reasons I donate there in the first place. Now they're adding additional requirements, which most of the voting memebers voted for, this doesn't seem strange to me.
> Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.
Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.
Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read, and seems it auto-closes no matter where you click. Seems a bit distracting if nothing else :)
> Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.
It's different conceptions of freedom. For some, the freedom to oppress is not freedom at all, and building non-free software is oppressive.
> Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read
Yes, clicking makes it go away! It's an overlay that opens when you leave the page, saying you should really not run Javascript programs sent by the web server because they can do pretty much anything.
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice:
>
> Side projects and experiments with little resource usage
>
> Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated
I do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.
TL;DR: AI assisted coding, when used responsibly, is not banned, however one-shotting something via vibe-coding and hosting it as a complete project, is.
Also, Codeberg always had a limit on private repositories and never wanted to be a place for non-FLOSS software. It's their mission. They are not out there to replace GitHub/GitLab.
> TL;DR: AI assisted coding, when used responsibly, is not banned, however one-shotting something via vibe-coding and hosting it as a complete project, is.
Doesn't seem to be what they put in their ToS:
>You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
Unless you've defined "responsibly" in a funny way.
>and the only cOmMuNiTy they have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs
Not even this. Most open source software is solely used by the creator and usually soon after abandoned. The idea of starting a new project and abandoning it after the honeymoon period is nowhere near a new phenomenon.
The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
I don't share that concern.
It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources. Personally, I have a group of friends who share a GitLab instance, for example. Are you allowed to use it? No. Why? Because I didn't go to middle school with you decades ago. Is that fair? I don't really find that question relevant. I also keep a Gitea instance running at home for all the junk that really doesn't belong on someone else's hardware. Using someone else's forge isn't the only option.
> The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
Yeah, it feels so good to know my AGPLv3 free software projects are illegitimate because I haven't managed to build a community around them yet. They don't matter, they're just "one-off" individual projects. Literally prompting and shipping Fable oneshots here.
> The author seems annoyed that Codeberg wants to focus on projects that have a legitimate contributor community and is not designed for one-off individual projects.
And the author is wrong. Nothing in the ban on heavy LLM-assisted projects + crypto and the subsequent blog post[0] is suggesting that Codeberg is against solo projects without community.
If you read the post[0] carefully and not using AI-summaries or assuming context from HN/Reddit/X comments you'll see that they are calling out specifically projects that overuse resources that are meant to be equally shared. For projects with large communities, that is expected, but solo projects with zero effective users spinning CI 20 hours a day and uploading many hundreds megabytes of code daily is just plain being an asshole.
When AI bros see words "free", they usually respond with "all for me?". But that's not how that works in most places, or atleast it's not sustainable.
Also note that Codeberg specifically said that while it's against terms, they are not going to scan for LLM-written code or pressure people to delete their small, low-resource-using repos.
It's absolutely Codeberg's right to do this, but I only wish that they had been more clear about this earlier, because now I have to move all my repos to my own forge.
I also do consider it to be extremely disappointing that my FOSS projects under approved licences are not welcome because they don't have a community, even if they are taking only hundreds of kilobytes of disk space and bandwidth.
Codeberg's website currently says it hosts "650198 projects". How many of those are solo programmers or projects without a significant community? I suspect if they were to enforce their policy they would only have several hundred projects on the platform in total. That being said, I'm not taking chances that my repos might be nuked at any time so I have no choice but to move.
I agree with this and I think it's the right way to think about it.
They have the right to create their community as they want to. No one is forced to use them.
If a gitea instance only wants to offer free hosting only for rust projects, that's their right.
I think the problem here is that codeberg was seen as a GitHub replacement and people were expecting the same openness, even if it was restricted only to open source projects.
> LLM-generated code, or is cryptocurrency-related
Codeberg is making decisions to better manage their resource and infrastructure. It's no different than any other privately owned platform, making decisions to forbid certain kinds of content, or ban people for various reasons. Unlike other large centralized platforms, they at least tried to involve the community in this decision-making process, but in the end it's their call.
If you don't want to be under the mercy of someone else's decisions, you have to become more independent and host it yourself. Even then, who owns your server? Who owns the "pipes" of the network? They have terms of services, and can also ban you for various reasons, including your nationality, beliefs, etc. This line of thinking leads to a bigger question of how/whether a truly decentralized and free (as in freedom) computing and communication network is possible, how such a network can defend against abuse and malicious actors without compromising that freedom.
> The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:
> > Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.
---
This naive "rapid pace"...
Those who do in that careless "pace" will invest more time maintaining it, fixing it, supporting it, or well... realizing it, I believe.
Not to mention that they make themselves more and more dependent on some LLM vendor prospering these vendors with each iteration and tokens burned, and training their models on your own ideas, creativity, and your time of life. Yet, not a single person will guarantee a stable outcome, and no one to blame after. Is that "development"? That is dark horrific sorrow.
This "vibe coding" may be quick at starters, if lucky and all Gods and the Fortune got you, yet supporting that and investing your life time after?
No, never. I have my own mind to train. The people I work with have their own minds. The Communities out there have their own minds. We all have our mind to develop, and learn from each other. Otherwise, it’s empty, pointless, and not art you will be proud of as a developer who inscribes moments in the history, and stand your name in it.
This prompted me to revisit my own decision to avoid Codeberg by re-reading their Terms of Use[1]. A few things stand out:
- They explicitly require all hosted software to have a FLOSS license
- Private repos are only allowed in support of Public FLOSS repos, with a scary ambiguous note about "really small and personal stuff"
- Projects with heavy use of coding AI are explicitly forbidden
This means I can't use Codeberg for personal projects that aren't intended for public consumption, especially if I used Claude Code to whip them up. Oh well, this is why I self-host Forgejo.
For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:
> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.
> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
I'm a member of Codeberg and was allowed to vote on these amendments. There was the annual assembly meeting before the ballots were sent by email. Each proposal had a short presentation and a few minutes of Q&A.
It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue.
It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"
Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix
I had a project on there. The vote result was clearly already a foregone conclusion the moment it was announced. Any voices that even asked for clarification were shouted down on multiple forums. I had never joined as a formal community member to get involved in voting on there, but saw no point in doing so prior to the vote. The tone on external forums (Mastodon, etc.) was just brutal, and the discussion on the PR confined and curtailed.
I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this:
Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there.
Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process.
And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off.
That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group.
... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.
The problem with politically radical communities is that sooner or later you'll find yourself on the other side. "I didn't speak out because I wasn't X" and all that. I never liked codeberg because I saw the writing on the wall. GitHub is flawed, but it is at least more tolerant of dissenting values. You can both host anti AI and pro AI content side by side; imagine that!
> [From CodeBerg] It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
> This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows
Yes! And LLMs can be valuable to solo devs!
> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did...
I agree this is troubling.
There's a lot of LLM dislike that verges into a potentially problematic ideology. I know: how a tool is used, not the tool itself, etc, but I'm unsure that that kind of approach is visible to CodeBerg. I write open source, and closed source, and I am a responsible developer who uses AI and gets more done, better. I wish I was welcome there.
> Despite not owning a single project that falls into either banned category, I’m now going to look into setting up my own public Git host
That's.. good, actually. I believe that even if Codeberg was good and perfect for every use case of code hosting, not every one and every project should be there. Vibe-coders, shitcoin cryptomaxis, and lovers of total freedom surely have other places to go and are able to set up forges using the same software that Codeberg uses as well. It's the magic of open source.
Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet. GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, sure, they might have been better back in the day, but being _the_ places for a type of content online they were able to privatize a lot of very valuable data, sell it off for AI training, while slowly strangling to death any interoperability and "public access" that once made the services feel like a free-for-all market square of the internet. Long live the small web!
Codeberg is not in any way obligated to make sweeping infrastructure changes just to make sure that they can keep hosting projects they find to be against their mission.
> Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet.
There's a reason these came to be in the first place though, and accounts are among the most prominent ones. A new forum means not just registering at yet another place, it also means creating a new label/folder in your email inbox and a new filter rule to properly redirect stuff. That's friction.
Codeberg is run by a German association, which defines its role in the bylaws to support FOSS (§2 in the bylaws). You can use their software Forgejo to run your own server.
Article summary: Censorship is when you choose not to host some things on your platform. The author, although not caring about LLMs or cryptocurrency, can't bear to use a platform where some things are not allowed.
I wonder how anyone can migrate to codeberg. Every time I check, the site is lagging. Few days ago I registered and tried to create a repository. I couldn't, site busy or something.
The migration towards codeberg already started a while ago, don't see how it can scale.
Another very american understanding of censorship. In Germany (where Codeberg is registered), censorship means censorship by a government. A private entity (Verein) deciding what and how they want to run their business is typically not considered censorship (maybe the term "private censorship" could work), but just "freedom of doing business". So if you want to argue FOR freedom, you could also turn this argument around and support the fact that a private entity should be able to decide whatever the fuck they want to do with their own service offering.
Hmmm. They migrated from github because it was becoming shitty, now their complaint with codeberg is more that will ban on the basis of content. On the next gitwhatever they will find for sure other issues.
I know it's hard but any non-casual developer must self-host their version control (and assorted project data), and treat cloud VCs sites just as mirrors.
Whole story makes me think of Lyudmilla from Star City. You think these measure are about the common good but most people just don’t see the psychopaths in front of them taking control, step by step. You didn’t vote to stop AI slop. You voted to approve discrimination. The question on paper was “Can we ban AI slop” but the actual vote was “This site doesn’t discriminate. Some of us want power to fuck people over. Do you want to take a step in that direction?” It’s funny that they talk about communities because online communities are very often cesspools of psychopaths. I suppose it’s good that they showed us who they are.
Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.
I’d been thinking maybe I should move some projects from GitHub to Codeberg… but this change has a chilling effect since now whoever is making the LLM-generated decision might arbitrarily decide to ban a project based on undefined criteria, like say an em dash in a README — so projects hosted there are not in any way safe from just disappearing.
To be honest though, I don’t know what happens when something gets banned from Codeberg, or anything about the appeals process, so my brain leap to the project just disappears forever; afaik the posts I read about this policy change didn’t say. Would welcome anyone familiar with their policies to chime in and enlighten me.
Codeberg is also not being considered anymore since they are censoring legitimate projects, crazy honestly, people would have thought that they would be neutral but it's the opposite of neutral, it's way worse than Corporations.
Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.
A little bit offtopic, but I spend 12 USD a month for a 1 high performance core, 2GB ram, 50GB NVME SSD VPS, and slap nginx and cgit config on there, and host my own git repos.
I realize this doesn't work for everyone, and not everyone has the money to spare, but it's really nice to be able to host your own stuff on your own website, and not be tied down to a forge like github or codeberg.
Bonus points if you have the hardware and network capacity to host this at home!
How is it bonus points if you host at home? My big fear is that a fire, etc deletes my data. You're going to need that extra server whether you like it or not.
I'm still undecided if I want to self host either gitea or forgejo. Can someone who used both or is particularly experienced with one of them tell me which project to settle with?
Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.
To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?
I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?
I'm not sure either, the forgejo/gitea fork seems to also involve a lot of activism and interpersonal drama. And codeberg shares a lot of the people involved in that drama on the forgejo side. The gitea/opencollective side has it's own share of "difficult" people.
So I know of no technical reason why any should be better. And the potential for drama and conflict inherent in the developers of both projects make me wary. In the end I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.
If your goal is to just store your repos, even Gogs will do. I self-host Forgejo on sqlite and it‘s been great thusfar. I do not yet use runners, so can‘t say much about that. The Docker registry they offer is a bit awkward to use but better than nothing. My instance is only intranet visible, so I only push to http:// remotes. I have my repos docker volume backed up automatically, so I feel like I got a pretty solid setup right now.
I threw my lot in with Forgejo. After the fork, most of the maintainers went along with it.
In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.
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[ 0.47 ms ] story [ 58.6 ms ] thread> the only cOmMuNiTy [most free software projects] have around them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time not contributing in any form whatsoever
Reporting bugs is contributing. Especially when you emphasize "any form whatsoever".
That said, I broadly agree with the author. But I wonder if this attempt to discourage egregious AI slop will some day make Codeberg a more trustworthy or pleasant place than alternatives. Maybe it's not the right choice for OP (or me, for some projects), but it seems like a good thing for a sizeable forge to exist that has some strictness or selectiveness to it. Maybe the world doesn't need another one-size-fits-all platform like GitHub.
Codeberg might ironically become a boon to AI companies with this policy, as well, by effectively doing a bunch of curation work for them, if not by providing outright untainted training data.
- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT
- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube
- Amazon.com: waifu pillow
When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):
https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js
But, wait, Codeberg always had limitations on what projects are hosted there??? This been very explicit from the start, it's for FOSS and anything outside of that isn't welcome. It's one of the reasons I donate there in the first place. Now they're adding additional requirements, which most of the voting memebers voted for, this doesn't seem strange to me.
> Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.
Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.
Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read, and seems it auto-closes no matter where you click. Seems a bit distracting if nothing else :)
It's different conceptions of freedom. For some, the freedom to oppress is not freedom at all, and building non-free software is oppressive.
> Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read
Yes, clicking makes it go away! It's an overlay that opens when you leave the page, saying you should really not run Javascript programs sent by the web server because they can do pretty much anything.
It is for FOSS, but they seem to be more restrictive now than even that, and I don't mean by LLMs. To quote their blog post: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice: > > Side projects and experiments with little resource usage > > Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated
I do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.
TL;DR: AI assisted coding, when used responsibly, is not banned, however one-shotting something via vibe-coding and hosting it as a complete project, is.
Also, Codeberg always had a limit on private repositories and never wanted to be a place for non-FLOSS software. It's their mission. They are not out there to replace GitHub/GitLab.
Doesn't seem to be what they put in their ToS:
>You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
Unless you've defined "responsibly" in a funny way.
Not even this. Most open source software is solely used by the creator and usually soon after abandoned. The idea of starting a new project and abandoning it after the honeymoon period is nowhere near a new phenomenon.
I don't share that concern.
It's not all that different from Mastodon instances. It's a community space, and the community gets to decide who they allow to use their resources. Personally, I have a group of friends who share a GitLab instance, for example. Are you allowed to use it? No. Why? Because I didn't go to middle school with you decades ago. Is that fair? I don't really find that question relevant. I also keep a Gitea instance running at home for all the junk that really doesn't belong on someone else's hardware. Using someone else's forge isn't the only option.
Yeah, it feels so good to know my AGPLv3 free software projects are illegitimate because I haven't managed to build a community around them yet. They don't matter, they're just "one-off" individual projects. Literally prompting and shipping Fable oneshots here.
And the author is wrong. Nothing in the ban on heavy LLM-assisted projects + crypto and the subsequent blog post[0] is suggesting that Codeberg is against solo projects without community.
If you read the post[0] carefully and not using AI-summaries or assuming context from HN/Reddit/X comments you'll see that they are calling out specifically projects that overuse resources that are meant to be equally shared. For projects with large communities, that is expected, but solo projects with zero effective users spinning CI 20 hours a day and uploading many hundreds megabytes of code daily is just plain being an asshole.
When AI bros see words "free", they usually respond with "all for me?". But that's not how that works in most places, or atleast it's not sustainable.
Also note that Codeberg specifically said that while it's against terms, they are not going to scan for LLM-written code or pressure people to delete their small, low-resource-using repos.
[0] - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
I also do consider it to be extremely disappointing that my FOSS projects under approved licences are not welcome because they don't have a community, even if they are taking only hundreds of kilobytes of disk space and bandwidth.
Codeberg's website currently says it hosts "650198 projects". How many of those are solo programmers or projects without a significant community? I suspect if they were to enforce their policy they would only have several hundred projects on the platform in total. That being said, I'm not taking chances that my repos might be nuked at any time so I have no choice but to move.
If a gitea instance only wants to offer free hosting only for rust projects, that's their right. I think the problem here is that codeberg was seen as a GitHub replacement and people were expecting the same openness, even if it was restricted only to open source projects.
Codeberg is making decisions to better manage their resource and infrastructure. It's no different than any other privately owned platform, making decisions to forbid certain kinds of content, or ban people for various reasons. Unlike other large centralized platforms, they at least tried to involve the community in this decision-making process, but in the end it's their call.
If you don't want to be under the mercy of someone else's decisions, you have to become more independent and host it yourself. Even then, who owns your server? Who owns the "pipes" of the network? They have terms of services, and can also ban you for various reasons, including your nationality, beliefs, etc. This line of thinking leads to a bigger question of how/whether a truly decentralized and free (as in freedom) computing and communication network is possible, how such a network can defend against abuse and malicious actors without compromising that freedom.
This naive "rapid pace"...
Those who do in that careless "pace" will invest more time maintaining it, fixing it, supporting it, or well... realizing it, I believe.
Not to mention that they make themselves more and more dependent on some LLM vendor prospering these vendors with each iteration and tokens burned, and training their models on your own ideas, creativity, and your time of life. Yet, not a single person will guarantee a stable outcome, and no one to blame after. Is that "development"? That is dark horrific sorrow.
This "vibe coding" may be quick at starters, if lucky and all Gods and the Fortune got you, yet supporting that and investing your life time after?
No, never. I have my own mind to train. The people I work with have their own minds. The Communities out there have their own minds. We all have our mind to develop, and learn from each other. Otherwise, it’s empty, pointless, and not art you will be proud of as a developer who inscribes moments in the history, and stand your name in it.
For reference, here's the parts of the TOS that define the above:
> 1. Public repository content shall be made available under a copyright licence [...] referred to as ‘licences for free and open source software, free and open source hardware, or free cultural works’. Examples of such licences include those created or approved for free software projects by the Free Software Foundation, for open source projects by the Open Source Initiative, and for free cultural works by Creative Commons. Note, however, that the Creative Commons licences with Non-Commercial (NC) or No Derivatives (ND) restrictions are not licences for free cultural works and thus do not fulfil the licensing requirement.
> 2. Private repositories are only allowed for things required for FLOSS projects, like storing secrets, team-internal discussions or hiding projects from the public until they're ready for usage and/or contribution. They are also allowed for really small & personal stuff like your journal, config files, ideas or notes, but explicitly not as a personal cloud or media storage.
> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
It wasn't a discussion (the text was final at this point), it was just to ask for clarifications. In the meeting I asked about the server load that they mentioned in their presentation, but misphrased it and got some answer about (AI?)bots scraping Codeberg and not if auto-generated code being shared on Codeberg is actually an issue.
It seemed pretty useless compared to commenting on the ticket where one could have a structured discussion. I also don't know how many of the >1000 members were in the meeting in the first place and how many just got the email "Wanna ban AI? Vote now!"
Once the results were announced, the rest of the users came into the ticket and started asking questions https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253#issuecomment-19... This was then shut down and if you have questions you should join the chat room on Matrix
I've already been downvoted to oblivion and insulted galore on yesterday's thread for commenting on this so I don't have much energy for it today but I'll say this:
Nobody can reasonably fault a community if they want to define their own limits and terms to engagement with their resources. They can legitimately be angry and frustrated if you do so retroactively and without clarity. I put a lot of work into moving onto Codeberg in the first place -- because I (thought I) shared their values. There was not a single note or concern about agentic tool use then, nor in the 10 months I was on there.
Further the actual blog post that finally described the terms and how they will do enforcement came after the vote on the rather narrow clause in the PR. So, again, no, this is not a healthy democratic process.
And then I had to put a lot of work into moving off.
That's my time and energy and the energy of my contributors wasted and it's just strikes me as poor behaviour driven by a crowd with pitchforks that wants to wave them and had a priori defined an in and out group.
... But at least I had an LLM minion to help me with the moving off part.
>sh.tcoin
in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though
> [From CodeBerg] It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
> This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of FOSS developers are one-man-shows
Yes! And LLMs can be valuable to solo devs!
> The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did...
I agree this is troubling.
There's a lot of LLM dislike that verges into a potentially problematic ideology. I know: how a tool is used, not the tool itself, etc, but I'm unsure that that kind of approach is visible to CodeBerg. I write open source, and closed source, and I am a responsible developer who uses AI and gets more done, better. I wish I was welcome there.
That's.. good, actually. I believe that even if Codeberg was good and perfect for every use case of code hosting, not every one and every project should be there. Vibe-coders, shitcoin cryptomaxis, and lovers of total freedom surely have other places to go and are able to set up forges using the same software that Codeberg uses as well. It's the magic of open source.
Seriously, we should let go of the idea that all of humanity should be part of a single Data Silo on the internet. GitHub, Twitter, Reddit, sure, they might have been better back in the day, but being _the_ places for a type of content online they were able to privatize a lot of very valuable data, sell it off for AI training, while slowly strangling to death any interoperability and "public access" that once made the services feel like a free-for-all market square of the internet. Long live the small web!
Codeberg is not in any way obligated to make sweeping infrastructure changes just to make sure that they can keep hosting projects they find to be against their mission.
There's a reason these came to be in the first place though, and accounts are among the most prominent ones. A new forum means not just registering at yet another place, it also means creating a new label/folder in your email inbox and a new filter rule to properly redirect stuff. That's friction.
The migration towards codeberg already started a while ago, don't see how it can scale.
Banning a portion of their community is... one way to reduce server load.
I know it's hard but any non-casual developer must self-host their version control (and assorted project data), and treat cloud VCs sites just as mirrors.
Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.
To be honest though, I don’t know what happens when something gets banned from Codeberg, or anything about the appeals process, so my brain leap to the project just disappears forever; afaik the posts I read about this policy change didn’t say. Would welcome anyone familiar with their policies to chime in and enlighten me.
Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.
I realize this doesn't work for everyone, and not everyone has the money to spare, but it's really nice to be able to host your own stuff on your own website, and not be tied down to a forge like github or codeberg.
Bonus points if you have the hardware and network capacity to host this at home!
Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.
To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?
I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?
So I know of no technical reason why any should be better. And the potential for drama and conflict inherent in the developers of both projects make me wary. In the end I decided to use forgejo, because absent a corporation at least the possibility of a corporate rugpull is reduced.
In any case, it has a FOSS license and can’t be restricted against certain uses the same way Codeberg is. By analogy, my own instance is way more restricted: only a couple of people are allowed to write to it at all.