> In addition, Codeberg conflates “having a community” with “being legitimate software worth hosting”
I don't think this is a fair summary. I don't see this conflation in Codeberg's blog post. The words in quotation marks don't actually exist in Codeberg's blog post.
It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team. The concern is that some people don't gobble up an unfair amount of resources.
I personally have been moving to self-hosted Foregejo for ultimate freedom. But I also think it's fair for some providers have the freedom to take a bit more of a harsh (or based - depending on your perspective) stance against LLM generated code. I mean, a lot of people have been bemoaning the fact that the human-generated material has been increasingly hard to find in a sea of AI-generated material. It could be nice to have a corner of curated, human-made code still available on the web.
> It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
---
> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> 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.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
Define resources and create a better limit then. 10 small code-only projects will take orders of magnitude less storage, bandwidth and cpu than one project with committed image and sound assets.
The main problem is that so many LLM users are selfish bastards and they won't respect the spirit of such rules and will only stop when the hard disk quotas force them to.
So now your solution entails lowering the quota for everybody because allowing in LLyou must assume eve
> It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.
This is not about demanding a community, as the article argues about at great length: it's only a polite way to say that many ‘vibe coders’ are annoying, negative net value assholes. Community would ensure that they are not aberrant lone wolves.
yes, but as freedom of expression allows 'assholes' to say whatever they want, free software also allows 'assholes' to develop whatever they want - and limiting it while position itself as the lighthouse of freedom makes Codeberg people the actual assholes
Freedom of expression does not mean my non-profit has to spend its resources to give you a platform. I'm not a member of Codeberg eV, but i strongly approve their decision. We need more hosts with a mission, especially when it comes to AI and promoting human-crafted resources.
Freedom of expression, as defined in the US, sure. But not everybody in the internet shares the definition.
E.g. as a European my idea of freedom of speech is not limited to the things I am allowed to say, but also about whether spaces exist in which I can say them. US style freedom of speech, doesn't produce any more insightful or free discourse than over here. In fact I'd argue it produces a discourse where voices win that are the loudest, most outrageous and least respectful, while voices that are more reasonable are frightened away.
It is the same thing that happens if a state gives up her monopoly of violence: The strongest dominate, while the weaker, more peaceful ones suffer.
Freedom is not just the freedom to do X, it is also the freedom of not having X done to you, as well as the freedom of living in a space where doing X is actually possible.
This means a free society does not have to endure all voices, especially those that aim at harming others or have the goal of using freedom of speech to get rid of the free society. Don't like the rules of a free society? Then you don't get to easily claim the protections granted by one. You can't whine to the referee if your goal is to get rid of the referee — I mean you could, but that would be pathetic.
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
There was also a discussion on the codeberg forum.
Anyway, I hope this new rule will be overturned in the future. I think it invites arbitrariness and besides, whether or not a project was vibecoded (and how much) doesn't really decide how useful or even how well-written it is.
So I voted against, partly because I feel that the text doesn't to justice to such a multifaceted topic.
If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me.
But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer
We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need.
I feel like we are already there. I am not vibecoding a lot, but I certainly use LLM-assisted coding now for most of my work. Once you go beyond vibe coding, an LLM feels a lot like a compiler from your well-specified ideas to code. So, to some extend, these restrictions feel like disallowing a higher-level programming language in a time when everyone was still writing machine code.
I understand where this decision is coming from (especially because they have been under attack by LLM bots) and it is well within their right, but the vague language adds a lot of uncertainty:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line? In such cases a project 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools', but the quality is probably not worse than fully hand-written code, especially because an LLM is often more able to 'think' of all kinds of corner cases.
I have some projects on Codeberg and donate monthly, but I have to reconsider both, since with this change Codeberg does not really align with how I work anymore. The projects that I have on Codeberg are largely human-written, but certainly use LLM-assistance for new code.
At any rate, I guess I'm back to GitHub until I have found a better alternative.
> It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line?
My impression is that they don‘t care, it’s still ”slop” for them and for most of coderbergers for that matter.
But I do exactly this. It‘s a code base that I have written prior manually, before LLMs, so now this helps a lot with boilerplate and add features. LLM-assisted is not vibe-coding, but FWIW I don‘t care what others think.
A big seal of quality because it is human written? Maybe in narrow spaces but in general, I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI. It’s codebergs infra so their choice, but it seems like an overly simplistic solution to a complicated advancing technology, in that it is a threadbare line between “vibe-coded” and “complex agent harness with human oversight and review”.
Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
> I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI.
I'd put money on the average AI-coded project being of a worse quality, simply because the number of vibe-coders with no experience now outnumbers actual coders using AI-assist around 10 to 1.
I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
AI on average might write better code, but there's no way AI prompted by a shoe salesman is going to be better than code written by a person with even 2x years of experience.
I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI.
I'd take that bet if it was measured in "bugs per day" instead of "bugs per LOC". LLMs generate far fewer bugs in absolute terms, but they also generate far more code, so it probably balances out if everything is equal. I think LLMs will actually lead to more bugs just because they're usually working with poorly defined requirements (prompts) and they guess to fill in the gaps based on the averages of their training data. A lot of those guesses are wrong.
Where LLMs win though is the severity. An LLM will write buggy code in the sense that it doesn't do what you wanted it, but not so much in the sense of security or data loss bugs. They get that right more than humans because they're trained to care about that stuff. There's far more "how to write good code" content in the training data than "how to not care about security and go fast" content (because writing that would be weird!)
You’d take the bet if you could completely choose a different set of parameters? At no point did I say every line of a vibe-coded project in its entirety is better than every line of every repository created by humans, or anything of the sort.
You also go on to admit that the direct quality of the code is likely to better when written by AI — exactly the basis of what I argued — but wish to disagree with what I argued? An interesting position that I don’t quite follow.
The point was that using “human” as an indicator of “code quality” is nonsense. I get CB reasoning for disallowing “vibe-coded” apps when talking about the junk that people are constantly updating/building/deploying for an audience of none, wasting resources. Totally sensible from that perspective, but it takes a baby with the bath water approach that all vibe-coding is bad. I’m simply saying the point of view “if AI then bad, if human then good” isn’t grounded in reality and that your average developer is not producing high quality, well structured, well organized, well documented code. On average, it could be even odds as to whether that developer primarily works on Wordpress.
I'm not saying you can't be happy with autogenerated software, especially for something like a dictation app where the main functionality amounts to a language selector (or calling into a detector) and calling TTSlibary.render(String text).play(). You could also just use an existing TTS app, but whatever works for you
For more complex software, so far it has been my experience that you get more predictable behavior (fewer edge-cases), performance, and relevant (but, to be fair, less comprehensive) documentation when someone thought about and built it
For software that became popular, sure. Have you spent a lot of time looking at horribly written unpopular software that far outpaces the popular ones in quantity, not quality?
I fully agree that a well-written human application can be far better organized and documented. But I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on, but rather the bottom 90% that get far fewer eyes and are way more poorly written, regardless of perceived complexity.
Hah, that's a unique argument. I haven't before been quizzed on how much time I spend with unpopular software. Do you have a minute? xD I think I use more unpopular software than 99% of the world population. Besides that it's part of my job to security test what are usually internal applications (every ~two weeks a new one), I also use basically only software from F-Droid and the Debian repositories, pulling only the apps from the Play Store from (semi) governments where it's unpractical to get by without them. Besides that, a lot of what I use is self-written, with number of users at most a few hundred, biasing heavily towards one. Yes, I'm familiar with hobby coding projects thank you very much :D
> I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on
I have all the time in the world for interesting topics of debate. I’ve equally reviewed quite a lot of poorly written tools, libraries, and APIs in the search for far less mainstream solutions to complex problems; guess our conclusions on what quality we found differ, which is the human experience.
Like I said, I’m not claiming AI outperforms in quality in all cases; it can be just as bad as human code can be. I just disagree with the idea that “human written” is a proxy for “quality code” in my experience.
> imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today)
I have no idea how you'd quantify that, but they're pretty good already. At least in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
I share everybody's concern about many aspects of LLMs; copyright, data collection, energy use, component prices, not to mention what it does to us: outsourcing our thinking, dependency, slop. And I don't entirely disagree wanting to limit that.
And yet, I have just written a library that I was planning to put on Codeberg, but I've used a lot of LLM assistance for it, because it's simply too big otherwise. I put a lot of effort on code quality and architecture, and I don't think this counts as slop, but I do think it violates Codeberg's new rule, so I guess I'll have to look for another place.
No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
If you could have built it yourself but it was just too much work for the available time, then I trust that indeed the architecture will be sound and it sounds to me like it should be fine to build this way and host on Codeberg... until this amendment :/. I feel sorry that I'm part of this organisation that just shut the door on you
How's your appetite for self hosting? I've only ever hosted the predecessor of Forgejo, Gitea, and that was a breeze. Sadly I'm not aware of other open source hosting platforms, like, if you search "forgejo is confirmed" (with quotes) you find a lot of instances, but the point of Codeberg was the (presumed) longevity
I was hoping my library is useful enough to enough people that a community would form around it. Self hosting doesn't sound like a good way to do that.
I'll have a look at Gitea. Otherwise it's probably going to be Github. Or I'll self host until I find something better.
> What kind of conversation has been present in the chat room?
The original reply that closes the issue is this:
> This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org
I didn't join the chat so I don't know that. It's final now anyway, nobody can change the text (next year you can propose another vote). No idea what the point would be of ephemeral conversations about it
> Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://...
> This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file.
> [some more info about how to use your token]
The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
> As highlighted by [...], status quo for now due to being sent for voting, minor edits can be made by the board/presidium if the text generally passes.
It's fascinating to me how relatively unknown projects like these have very fancy governance terms like board and presidium for what amounts to a handful of people in a private Discord DM discussing a text document. It's kinda like bureaucracy larping.
Nobody is LARPing an Eingetragener Verein, they're just being one, and the law requires them to have a board and presidium.
As they got hundreds of votes on the issue, that means tens of thousands of euros in membership contributions. It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to create a legal entity for that, and an e.V. is easier to set up in the beginning (although it can lead to a lot of drama later).
I believe you, but it still gives the outside impression of nerds taking themselves quite seriously. Leave it to the Germans to be tediously bureaucratic, I suppose?
I am, and I'm sure there are rules for non-profits in the US that are just as tedious! Like I said in a different comment, I didn't realize Codeberg had a whole German non-profit thing behind it.
I have German background, so that was a genuine concern for me when I started using Codeberg 3 years ago. It's not a great surprise that they end up being more interested in rulemaking around FOSS hosting than in FOSS hosting itself.
Sort of yeah! I got used to it by now. At the local hackerspace we have a voorzitter, penningmeester, and secretaris -> president, treasurer, and secretary I think would be the English terms. All sounding fancy and together they're the board. But they don't dress up or anything, it's just terms that are commonplace for small organisations here, in Germany (like with Codeberg) as in the Netherlands (like our hackerspace). In practice people just do as they see fit, the titles are often just a formality and not taken seriously unless you can use it to teasingly redirect work onto another person :)
That's normal for any "vereniging", "Verein", union or association. My VVE (HOA) has that too. So did both of the student unions I've been a member of. There are organisations for playing games that have the same structure. As soon as you've got any kind of money or responsibility involved, you need some governance structure, or you're just giving your money to some guy.
And the complexity of the governance structure is related to the amount of money involved.
The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend.
Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
Ah, interesting! I didn't realize they were German, and didn't realize it's a non-profit as well. I thought it was just an open source project and that was that. That would explain the bureaucracy.
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.
> 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.
I think it's a bad example since your private GitLab instance wasn't all over the HN earlier screaming "are you tired of Github outages and Microslop breaking it every day? Migrate all your shit to Codeberg, the good guys of the internet" only to later pull the rug like this.
Private stuff is cool and there's place for it. Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative and it's currently failing miserably at this.
I swear HN has some sort of Mandela effect about Codeberg's mission. Their website clearly states they're a community-led non-profit that hosts like-minded FOSS projects, and their FAQ directly asks you to host private repos somewhere else.
Yet the amount of comments in this site proposing them as a GitHub alternative for individuals and companies, and suggesting them to move their repos there is absurd, and not enough people correct them.
I'm genuinely confused by how often people make up something in their mind, get upset about it, and then angrily post an attack on the thing they made up in their mind. How does that happen? Aren't there enough upsetting real-world things already?
> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
The terms and conditions second point is "Allowed Content & Usage", and has been for a good 4 years, no one who's part of the organization would say it's a "drop-in GitHub alternative". It's not a "anything goes" git host either.
>> Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative
> What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
Codeberg's getting started documentation has the line, "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." [1]
Can you point me at the posts where Codeberg was suggesting this? I just ran a quick search of Codeberg-related HN posts from the last year, and while there are some instances of "why I moved my stuff to Codeberg" I wasn't able to find anything from the platform begging people to move. I believe you there could be examples, but that doesn't seem to be representative of the discussion.
At a macro level, this is always going to be a struggle for projects that are an alternative to enshittified corporate services. Hosting costs money. It seems like the real solution here is to work on the problem of federation between forges.
> 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.
Codeberg market themselves as not just a host but a community, so mass banning projects that didn't do anything wrong and were previously operating within the rules feels more like rejection from a community rather than a business decision made of necessity, especially the way the decision came about via some quasi-democratic process.
Codeberg is a German e.V. claiming significant benefits from society, including tax-free status.
The argument “they can do whatever they want” doesn’t hold water. They are using legal privileges that other institutions don’t have, based on the assumption that they operate for the public benefit. I’m not saying that their current rules automatically mean they don’t live up to that claim, but it’s certainly worth a discussion.
> 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 think Codeberg was never intended for one-off individual projects in the first place, such as them discouraging private repositories. Quoting their Terms of Use [0]:
> 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. [...]
And this makes a ton of sense, because Codeberg is a community-funded volunteer-supported non-profit, and it doesn't make sense to spend their resources for repositories that don't benefit the public.
I think "legitimate contributor community" is just an excuse so I am not going to dwell on it. From Ghostty to Redis, rsync to Linux kernel, more and more FOSS projects are taking advantage of various AI tools in a responsible manner and closing the door on them is just unfortunate and backward in my opinion. We gain nothing from this change and lose a ton of progress in software freedom and digital commons.
> 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.
Of course, and the bigger community gets to discuss their decision. :)
I didn't look into codeberg really and didn't follow any discussions around it, except some projects fleeing to codeberg.
At the first glance it just looks like a github competitor. Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
I think that is a clear communication problem. Maybe the times are chaotic for them and they need to figure out how to position themselves. But appearing as just another github and expecting people to be reasonable with it's usage, is unreasonable on their side.
> ... Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
By registering for a Codeberg account, you consent to our Privacy Policy [1] and agree to our Terms of Use. [2]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
> Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient
I'm sure that if we were talking about a corporate entity, then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS" and "most ToSes are unenforceable", and guess what? In a world where significant AI assistance is becoming common, finding out which project is AI generated or even knowing the level of AI assistance is well nigh impossible and could be very well unenforceable.
Edit: It has come to my attention that Codeberg is a registered association[1]. It would be "fun" to see them argue about how they may argue that an AI assisted project has "harmed their reputation".
> ...then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS"...
This is unrelated to OP's claims that Codeberg not only doesn't make it clear that they "[P]rovide the essential infrastructure and organizational framework for the development of Open-Source Projects in decentralized and global communities, and other endeavours which serve this mission." and that "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.", but that Codeberg is unreasonable for not making that clear.
OP's assertions are why I said
Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?
> ...and "most ToSes are unenforceable"...
Eh? Codeberg's remedy is to cancel your account and attempt to ban you if you attempt to keep coming back and doing the things that got your account canceled. Do you intend to suggest that a European or USian court would disagree that Codeberg is permitted to do this?
Eh, I release my own one-off individual projects as FOSS. The entire point of FOSS and how most of the common FOSS originated was all one-off individual project. Even Linus created Linux because he could for himself (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/how-l...), and not because he wanted to invent a mailing list bureaucracy to blow his spare time.
Codeberg setting such a high bar means FOSS is dead unless you are a company spending millions to fund something from day zero.
I do think the author is right that the Codeberg post was wrong to assert that "community" is a measure of the legitimacy of a FOSS project
A massive amount of technology runs on essentially single-contributor projects with pretty much no "community": xz, core-js, GnuPG, NTPd, OpenSSL, cURL
They didn't need to make that implication or alienate solo devs in order to drive home their point
I think "community" and "contributor community" are getting conflated here (and I made the same mistake in my original comment).
All of the projects you cited certainly have a large user community.
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Codeberg is not saying that solo developers don't belong. Codeberg is saying that they exist for projects that contribute to an open source commons, and that spending money on hosting projects that use a lot of resources but don't meaningfully contribute to that commons isn't something they want to do. It seems like their intent here is practical, not philosophical. If servers and electricity grew on trees, they might very well would not have had to even had this discussion.
That would be a commercial activity. Codeberg is a non-profit host. I'm not familiar with german law but i assume non-profits can have some commercial activity (as long as they don't compete with commercial actors), but that would open an entire can of worms.
I think the path they chose is better: stay on their mission to provide free services to FLOSS projects who need it.
> 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.
I moved my projects to Codeberg 3 years ago because it promoted itself as a host for FOSS, and I was starting to think that GitHub was not going to remain a dependable FOSS host. All of mine are one-man itch-scratching that I am willing to share with others. None so far contain any LLM-assisted work.
A couple weeks ago I froze them, when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 came up. Not because of the LLM policy as such, but because this thread https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 convinced me that Codeberg can not be a dependable FOSS host. It's controlled by non-developers who don't have software development anywhere near the top of their priorities.
Same, the vibe I got from Codeberg was "Kumbaya everyone, come build free software here away from The Man spying on you". According to many HN commenters today it was always meant for serious projects and they don't want to waste money hosting your hobby side projects.
They should consider removing the word "hobbyists" from their homepage to avoid confusion if that's the case. When I think of hobbyist programmers, it could be someone making the trillionth todo app or vim extension, not maintaining curl.
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):
The whole blog post is also taking a stance. What is criticized is the specific stance taken by Codeberg. TFA seems to state that Codeberg should allow projects of all kinds to be hosted on their service (though apparently artificially limiting their resources would be alright).
I find it endearing that someone is keeping up the resistance against JavaScript. Used things like noscript myself since 2008 or so. Eventually gave up since nearly no website would work that way and served you captcha loops instead.
You gave up because the anti JavaScript position is completely insane and unreasonable?
The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.
The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.
I still use NoScript. I actually started in 2018. I will turn on 1 or 2 js sites for a respectable looking page, but blank screens and captchas are a good signal to bounce, or occasionally to use an incognito window which enables all JS.
As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.
I thought it was funny at first and kept clicking away to see what other random changes I'd get, but then I got a "Zuckerberg nudes" Google search webpage and I'm on my work computer...
Fortunately this functionality doesn't change your browser history, but it did really annoy me for a bit
> 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.
Migrated to it around 3 years ago. All I needed was a dependable and simpler (preferably EU-based) GitHub alternative for my FOSS code. Now I am migrating away and stopped my donations to the e.V. Not because I have cryptocurrency-related or vibecoded projects (I don't), but because this sets precedent of introducing vague rules that ban random/unpopular projects.
Ironically, I migrated to it from SourceHut because of similar rules introduced there.
I don't know you, but my feeling is you have the wrong analysis grid here. This is a non-profit taking a stand for what's right in a world where everything's wrong. The discussion has been ongoing for several years, and the rules introduced are not vague, and do not target random/unpopular projects.
I personally have trust in the human community behind codeberg. I understand if you don't. But my question is: why go with a non-profit host if you're not going to get involved in the governance? Of course governance is always happening in a project. For me, that power is shared and decisions are transparent are a criterium to trust codeberg even more.
> 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.
> 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.
> 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.
Is anyone else extremely annoyed with the way this is written? To me it reeks of paternalistic arrogance that simultaneously exposes the author's armchair psychological headcanon about how they imagine people to work with LLMs.
> [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.
When I read this quote I also had to think of this tante person on Mastodon urging their thousands of followers to vote for a certain thing. If one actor like this can possibly impact a small community this way, I'm on the cautious to sceptical side about that community project's future.
I'm sorry but you are completely out of touch with reality. This is a non-profit calling on their members to vote. Non-members didn't have a say, so a random member posting on Mastodon is not going to influence the results in the way that you imply (i.e. trolls raiding an online form).
Also, despite what your remote view suggests, members of non-profits usually have political opinions. Codeberg was founded for political reasons by people with political opinions: the members aren't waiting for someone on Mastodon to have an opinion.
Also, apart from this, people having opinions and encouraging others to defend their opinions is quite normal democratic process in a non-profit. Nothing to see here.
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.
That project just disappearing from your mind is probably for the better. If it was a company doing such an activist rug pull, you probably wouldn't want to deal with them either. That's probably just intuition telling you something.
They could've found so many more legitimate reasons for not wanting pure vibe code on their platform (load, resource constraints, github's uptime since AI assistance became mainstream, etc) but they chose the virtue signalling path instead.
It was always an ideology-driven project. LLM-hating now turned into a mandatory religious ritual for places like codeberg. That‘s fine though, one can self-host forgejo, gitea, gogs and so on. In fact the role of github and places like codeberg to form communities is rapidly diminishing. Even for FOSS it makes more sense to host privately than rely on somebody‘s corporate or emotionally-driven platform management.
Same. I moved to codeberg because of the non-commercial and "freedom" aspects. I enjoy vibe-coding tools for different applications, e.g. for prompt injection research. Now I will probably move back to Github. I accept this decision but I am quite disappointed by the ideology and black & white view.
LLMs are a fascinating technology created by us humans, and they have the potential to make our life better.
If you're a vegan as your nick suggests, i would suggest to reconsider this point. Capitalism was already bent on sending us towards a 6th mass species extinction (starting right under our noses), but so-called AI has changed the scale and speed of the curb drastically in only a few years. See for example this article for recent Google stats:
Recent AI datacenter projects such as Stratos (40000 acres) are on a scale of industrial destruction my mind fails to comprehend.
I'm not 100% vegan, but i'm 100% "AI-vegan", and i definitely would recommend you considering it.
PS: All i said was just about the environmental impact of LLMs. I suspect the human impact to be just as bad (cognitive impairment, accrued exploitation, etc).
Just noticed that there is a filter on repositories "Collaborative". Is this indication that we will not be allowed (immediately or eventually) to store either public or private repositories if we are not collaborating with others?
The answer to big platforms enshittifying is not to move to smaller versions of the same thing. This didn't work for GitHub -> Codeberg/Sourcehut, it didn't work for Twitter -> Mastodon. Because the problem is not necessarily the size, it's the power. Codeberg is exerting power beyond what it should and users have little recourse and get caught up in the issues, some Mastodon servers are fine but there have been plenty of admins who had the power go to their heads or had fallings out with other parts of the network, and again it's the users who get caught up in it.
The answer is building systems that prevent that power trip from ever happening. This is why Bluesky is a better answer to Twitter than Mastodon – the company has its faults, but the approach is a fundamental step forward that Mastodon did not take. The same thing is true of things like Tangled for a software forge. It's no surprise that both of these are based on ATProto, although I'm not saying ATProto is the only option here.
No this is my point, Mastodon doesn't solve this problem in the general case. The shift to Mastodon did not solve the problem of social network admins with too much power, because of the lock-in to instances. Most instances are fine, but there have been many that have caused their users a lot of difficulty, and users fundamentally don't own their data.
The way most users use Bluesky is no different, but the protocol is different, and it is possible to not fall afoul of these issues – data is portable, you can choose your moderation, UI, algorithms, etc, all separately rather than being forced to take a whole package and lose control.
See Blacksky for a completely separate stack, governed separately, that is still fully compatible. That's not possible with Mastodon or even ActivityPub.
I'm not going to do the protocol justice in an HN comment, but a core goal is to separate the entities that control the data, the entities that run the network, and the entities that control the interfaces (and recommendation algos etc).
If your Mastodon admin goes rogue, you a) have to get your data out of their hands, and b) have to rebuild your Mastodon presence in a new location, all your connections, history, etc are gone. That's exactly the same problem that Twitter users faced.
On ATProto, you can self-host your data while still making use of Bluesky/etc, in a way that you can't do with Mastodon or even email. You can choose who your UI comes from and just switch UI and keep everything, you can switch who your moderators are and keep everything else, etc.
Check out Blacksky, they're doing amazing work running a whole separate ATProto system that is fully compatible with, and actually the same social network as Bluesky. You can transparently migrate, at a protocol level, something Mastodon/ActivityPub doesn't attempt to tackle.
I think Codeberg is well within its rights to offer services in the way that it wants. If customers don't like it they can move & stop paying. Find a host that fits the terms you want and expect. That is what is great about Codeberg, no lockin no scam.
and users are within their rights to say Codeberg's actions are shitty, could've been done in a better way for same effect, and are problematic enough to raise all sorts of alarms and recommendations of avoiding any positive connotations in the future
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.
Weird thing is: I agree with both of you. Of course they can decide what to host and what not. And it's sad if that excludes me. But insulting small projects like that was uncalled-for.
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Absolutely. I have no complaint with their actual change to the terms of service. I've had an account with them for years, and I stopped hosting new repos there a year or two ago, because I got mixed signals about precisely what kinds of projects they want to host. I don't need a host, plenty of fish in the sea. But I also think the world is better for having them in it and being hardened against enshittification, and I don't want to see them constantly struggling to stay up under assault from LLM crawlers. I wish them well.
I am constantly ill-choosing words I didn't mean, it's not such a big deal.
I’ve recently moved to sourcehut and really enjoy it so far! While I think the creator has strong personal opinions about LLMs - I don’t think they have any intentions of banning LLM generated projects. Anyhow just wanted to share because I think it’s a really nice product that isn’t overbloated with JS and just gets the thing done.
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.
Making decisions based on distinguishing A from B is a legit thing to do. Complaining that it's "telling what's right and wrong" is a strawman argument IMO. It's about choices: they made a choice and many users are/will be joufully making the compatible choice.
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.
> so many people who have made "coding with an LLM" their whole personality
As opposed to "coding without an LLM" being their whole personality? Neither of these are what a personality is. Comments like thesen are needlessly dismissive and not conducive to a healthy discussion.
Codeberg has every right to set their own standards, but the discussion around it is ugly and dismissive of many well-meaning developers.
> 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.
> 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.
On Tuesday I was working on my Braille 'N Speak emulator[0], an ancient Z180-based accessible notetaker for the blind. I wanted a z180 emulation library that wasn't z180-emu (GPL) and that I could use on the web via wasm, on my phone, and would have a Python binding.
Of course, this is a perfect sort of job for an agent with a verification loop, so I went off and researched if there were any standard conformance suites for z80/z180. Turns out there are a ton! I wired up my verification loops, fired off /goal, and sat back. Now, I have my library[1].
Was "AI assisted coding" "used responsibly?"
Should this sort of thing be allowed? Why or why not?
It's about control. It's always been about control. The moderators of this project would happily throw you under the bus if you ever in any way displeased them while being an AI user.
I think this is the main drive behind this. Make it easier to get rid of people you don't like/don't welcome on your platform without making it explicit, because that could surface some biases of theirs.
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.
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.
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.
This is stupid and completely out of touch. No other way to put it. We started a local hackerspace and most of our projects heavily use AI assistants, now we'l be publishing elsewhere.
I hope Tangle doesn't get tangled up in these backward ideas.
>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.
I have ~100 repos on github and only a few of them with LLM assistance. Aside from a few comments and a PR here and there throughout the years nobody cares about them. I have to assume it's the same for the majority of developers.
> 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.
> 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.
Or the opposite, as the rules are you cannot use AI, all the attribution will be removed, but sure enough there still will be a bunch of AI written code there, people will just have an incentive to mask it instead. So it ends up being a place where AI/human code will be even harder to see the difference between, compared to GitHub, where people apparently have no shame in just attaching claude's username to their commits.
Why would you mask AI code and place it on Codeberg instead of some other place where it won't be deleted on sight? The only reason you would do that is to attack Codeberg.
Why do people use FOSS in their own projects without any sort of credit or attribution to those projects? Why do people copy code, remove who made it and say they wrote it? People do a lot of shitty stuff, hasn't stopped them before.
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?
(Disclaimer: I use Gitea daily for work and Codeberg daily for personal stuff. I prefer Codeberg)
Gitea is developed by a for-profit organisation while Forgejo is developed by a non-profit.
Ability for rug pull is much greater for gitea imo. Gitea (organisation) already develops non-foss software to sit on top of Gitea (software). Gitea requires copyright attributions for contributions so is more able to change the Gitea license to something non-free in the future.
Codeberg can make up whatever rules they want for their Forgjo instance but you can do what you like on your self-hosted instance so I dont think that the governance of codeberg should concerning for self-hosting.
If Forgejo somehow enshittified, I would expect a popular fork immediately. If Gitea enshittified, I expect most people who would have forked already went to forgejo
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.
> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same.
Apples to Oranges here. Linus has himself and the entirety of the Linux Foundation maintainers + outside contributors to effectively review and gatekeep llm slop from making into ONE codebase.
Codeberg has presumably way less people working for it than the Linux Foundation, and has to monitor an avalanche of codebases for slop. Of course they aren't going to be able to pull off what Linux can do.
> 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).
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.
> It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned
This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0]
> 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).
The only ambiguous part is what "mostly" means in practice, but otherwise the Terms of Use is pretty clear. I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive and tries to clarify things but it's all just one very unnecessary drama [2].
People who derisively call AIs LLMs (not people who are referring to the specific type of system) because they aren't really intelligence or whatever--and thereby sort of ignoring that "artificial" is there--are they aware that some of the AI models we use, e.g., diffusers, are not "LLMs?"
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.
I don't think this is a fair summary. I don't see this conflation in Codeberg's blog post. The words in quotation marks don't actually exist in Codeberg's blog post.
It seems that what they are saying is: In a free hosting platform where we share all the resources, it's not fair that some people using LLMs are using up disproportionately huge hosting resources to handle the unnaturally large amounts of resources they can churn out with these tools.
I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team. The concern is that some people don't gobble up an unfair amount of resources.
I personally have been moving to self-hosted Foregejo for ultimate freedom. But I also think it's fair for some providers have the freedom to take a bit more of a harsh (or based - depending on your perspective) stance against LLM generated code. I mean, a lot of people have been bemoaning the fact that the human-generated material has been increasingly hard to find in a sea of AI-generated material. It could be nice to have a corner of curated, human-made code still available on the web.
Then instead of addressing the excessive resource usage problem indirectly via banning AI-assisted apps, they could've addressed it directly by imposing limits/quotas.
It's abundantly clear (and not that they are hiding it either) that their issue is with AI itself so anything else is just a secondary concern if not even a smokescreen.
---
> I'm a solo dev, and I couldn't find the judgement against solo developers or any slight against people who don't have a team.
Quoting their blogpost [0]:
> ## The development team of none
> 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.
I couldn't care less about what they think about solo developers, but it's just one bad excuse after another and that's what people are criticising. Open Source is one person. [1]
---
[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
[1] https://opensourcesecurity.io/2025/08-oss-one-person/
Good. As a self-reported x100 Claude jockey you're welcome to build your own AI-friendly git hosting in two more weeks.
Why do you need us luddite meatbags anyways in Current Year?
And, if those alternatives don't exist, well, you now understand why Codeberg is taking the position they are.
So block huge resource use? What if people use LLMs with disproportionately tiny resource use?
So now your solution entails lowering the quota for everybody because allowing in LLyou must assume eve
I don't have to let you in, feed you and offer you a bed for the night. You can be free out there.
E.g. as a European my idea of freedom of speech is not limited to the things I am allowed to say, but also about whether spaces exist in which I can say them. US style freedom of speech, doesn't produce any more insightful or free discourse than over here. In fact I'd argue it produces a discourse where voices win that are the loudest, most outrageous and least respectful, while voices that are more reasonable are frightened away.
It is the same thing that happens if a state gives up her monopoly of violence: The strongest dominate, while the weaker, more peaceful ones suffer.
Freedom is not just the freedom to do X, it is also the freedom of not having X done to you, as well as the freedom of living in a space where doing X is actually possible.
This means a free society does not have to endure all voices, especially those that aim at harming others or have the goal of using freedom of speech to get rid of the free society. Don't like the rules of a free society? Then you don't get to easily claim the protections granted by one. You can't whine to the referee if your goal is to get rid of the referee — I mean you could, but that would be pathetic.
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
If all projects on Codeberg were human-written, that would be a big seal of quality! There are a lot of projects coming out now where someone feels like they've made a cool thing but it breaks on the first edge case and is entirely unmaintainable. Many are built on wrong principles because the prompt authors aren't savvy and don't know better. Some authors (I've encountered this in the OpenStreetMap community) even have the gall to pretend that their code is a gift that we now have to host and maintain. Aside from these quality and community issues, build and test pipelines also take a lot of compute resources, and with large growth in projects, that will increase as well. That the author of the proposal wants to avoid this makes a ton of sense to me.
But it also drives a lot of projects away because maybe you later want to use LLM assistance (imagine LLMs got twice as good as they are today), or maybe the auto-generated tests might become >50% of the code. You'd have to migrate your repository and community away from Codeberg. Why take that risk? It's just not a worry I feel that developers need. They're looking to get away from Microsoft (GitHub) for their open source project and that's the point where Codeberg should be a no-brainer
We're an open source community and so the mass stealing of all our work to feed LLM training which heats the world and causes (at least temporarily) giant price hikes in consumer hardware... there's a lot to say for more ethical training and use of LLMs, but does it matter at all if Codeberg bans LLM output? Won't we just make ourselves obsolete? Idk. It's multifaceted and this proposal seems too vague and blunt for me. That's not an option that's set in stone btw, just my current understanding of the different aspects
I feel like we are already there. I am not vibecoding a lot, but I certainly use LLM-assisted coding now for most of my work. Once you go beyond vibe coding, an LLM feels a lot like a compiler from your well-specified ideas to code. So, to some extend, these restrictions feel like disallowing a higher-level programming language in a time when everyone was still writing machine code.
I understand where this decision is coming from (especially because they have been under attack by LLM bots) and it is well within their right, but the vague language adds a lot of uncertainty:
You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools
It's clear that this excludes vibe coding. But what about LLM-assisted coding, where the developer writes very clear instructions of what to do and carefully reviews every line? In such cases a project 'mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools', but the quality is probably not worse than fully hand-written code, especially because an LLM is often more able to 'think' of all kinds of corner cases.
I have some projects on Codeberg and donate monthly, but I have to reconsider both, since with this change Codeberg does not really align with how I work anymore. The projects that I have on Codeberg are largely human-written, but certainly use LLM-assistance for new code.
At any rate, I guess I'm back to GitHub until I have found a better alternative.
My impression is that they don‘t care, it’s still ”slop” for them and for most of coderbergers for that matter.
But I do exactly this. It‘s a code base that I have written prior manually, before LLMs, so now this helps a lot with boilerplate and add features. LLM-assisted is not vibe-coding, but FWIW I don‘t care what others think.
Also, I’m actually quite happy with some of the vibe-coded apps I use. Handy is an example, which started as a vibecoded app, and is fantastic for STT/dictation. It seems like a literal baby with the bath water approach.
I'd put money on the average AI-coded project being of a worse quality, simply because the number of vibe-coders with no experience now outnumbers actual coders using AI-assist around 10 to 1.
I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!
AI on average might write better code, but there's no way AI prompted by a shoe salesman is going to be better than code written by a person with even 2x years of experience.
Even those devs that are currently overseeing are gradually atrophying their critical thinking skills in this space.
I'd take that bet if it was measured in "bugs per day" instead of "bugs per LOC". LLMs generate far fewer bugs in absolute terms, but they also generate far more code, so it probably balances out if everything is equal. I think LLMs will actually lead to more bugs just because they're usually working with poorly defined requirements (prompts) and they guess to fill in the gaps based on the averages of their training data. A lot of those guesses are wrong.
Where LLMs win though is the severity. An LLM will write buggy code in the sense that it doesn't do what you wanted it, but not so much in the sense of security or data loss bugs. They get that right more than humans because they're trained to care about that stuff. There's far more "how to write good code" content in the training data than "how to not care about security and go fast" content (because writing that would be weird!)
You also go on to admit that the direct quality of the code is likely to better when written by AI — exactly the basis of what I argued — but wish to disagree with what I argued? An interesting position that I don’t quite follow.
The point was that using “human” as an indicator of “code quality” is nonsense. I get CB reasoning for disallowing “vibe-coded” apps when talking about the junk that people are constantly updating/building/deploying for an audience of none, wasting resources. Totally sensible from that perspective, but it takes a baby with the bath water approach that all vibe-coding is bad. I’m simply saying the point of view “if AI then bad, if human then good” isn’t grounded in reality and that your average developer is not producing high quality, well structured, well organized, well documented code. On average, it could be even odds as to whether that developer primarily works on Wordpress.
For more complex software, so far it has been my experience that you get more predictable behavior (fewer edge-cases), performance, and relevant (but, to be fair, less comprehensive) documentation when someone thought about and built it
I fully agree that a well-written human application can be far better organized and documented. But I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on, but rather the bottom 90% that get far fewer eyes and are way more poorly written, regardless of perceived complexity.
> I’m not talking about the top 10% that most people interact with and focus on
I’m glad we're on the same page then :)
Like I said, I’m not claiming AI outperforms in quality in all cases; it can be just as bad as human code can be. I just disagree with the idea that “human written” is a proxy for “quality code” in my experience.
I have no idea how you'd quantify that, but they're pretty good already. At least in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing.
I share everybody's concern about many aspects of LLMs; copyright, data collection, energy use, component prices, not to mention what it does to us: outsourcing our thinking, dependency, slop. And I don't entirely disagree wanting to limit that.
And yet, I have just written a library that I was planning to put on Codeberg, but I've used a lot of LLM assistance for it, because it's simply too big otherwise. I put a lot of effort on code quality and architecture, and I don't think this counts as slop, but I do think it violates Codeberg's new rule, so I guess I'll have to look for another place.
No idea where yet; I don't want to go to Github, and I believe there were similar concerns about Gitlab, so I don't know where to go yet.
How's your appetite for self hosting? I've only ever hosted the predecessor of Forgejo, Gitea, and that was a breeze. Sadly I'm not aware of other open source hosting platforms, like, if you search "forgejo is confirmed" (with quotes) you find a lot of instances, but the point of Codeberg was the (presumed) longevity
I'll have a look at Gitea. Otherwise it's probably going to be Github. Or I'll self host until I find something better.
The original reply that closes the issue is this:
> This is not a place to continue or start a new discussion about AI or not AI and its copyright status in the world, it will not change the results or how its going to be interpreted. I'm closing this issue, you're more than welcome to continue this at https://matrix.to/#/#codeberg-offtopic:matrix.org
Make of the room topic what you will.
Was that actually the subject of the email? If so that's nuts.
> Subject: New poll on polls.codeberg.org
> A new poll has been created on polls.codeberg.org:
> Poll Question:
> Disallow vibe-coded projects (Terms of Use amendment) Do you agree to the changes from the Pull Request https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1253/files being accepted?
> Plese vote with token [my_vote_token] here: https://...
> This vote is completely anonymous, voting slips are not stored, only a counter is incremented, your token is not associated with you or your IP address in any way and neither this mail nor your token when voting will be written to any log file.
> [some more info about how to use your token]
The voting URL is disabled now (or at least it currently shows me a blank page) but I remember it quoting the proposed amendment text and you could click agree, disagree, or abstain
> As highlighted by [...], status quo for now due to being sent for voting, minor edits can be made by the board/presidium if the text generally passes.
It's fascinating to me how relatively unknown projects like these have very fancy governance terms like board and presidium for what amounts to a handful of people in a private Discord DM discussing a text document. It's kinda like bureaucracy larping.
As they got hundreds of votes on the issue, that means tens of thousands of euros in membership contributions. It doesn't seem unreasonable to want to create a legal entity for that, and an e.V. is easier to set up in the beginning (although it can lead to a lot of drama later).
The weirdest thing is when the money of a non-profit NGO exceeds roughly 10e6, the decisions made by upper management tend to make an inversionally proportionate amount of sense. Reason being, it's not their money to spend.
Took me a while to figure this out but now it's everywhere.
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.
I think it's a bad example since your private GitLab instance wasn't all over the HN earlier screaming "are you tired of Github outages and Microslop breaking it every day? Migrate all your shit to Codeberg, the good guys of the internet" only to later pull the rug like this.
Private stuff is cool and there's place for it. Codeberg was actively positioned as an indie almost drop-in Github alternative and it's currently failing miserably at this.
Yet the amount of comments in this site proposing them as a GitHub alternative for individuals and companies, and suggesting them to move their repos there is absurd, and not enough people correct them.
What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
The terms and conditions second point is "Allowed Content & Usage", and has been for a good 4 years, no one who's part of the organization would say it's a "drop-in GitHub alternative". It's not a "anything goes" git host either.
> What on earth are you talking about? No one, no less Codeberg themselves, would make up such fictitious comparison.
Codeberg's getting started documentation has the line, "Codeberg is not a for-profit corporation but an open community of free software enthusiasts providing a humane, non-commercial and privacy-friendly alternative to commercial services such as GitHub." [1]
[1] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/
As an illustrative example: Proton is an alternative to Microsoft Windows, but it is not a drop-in replacement.
At a macro level, this is always going to be a struggle for projects that are an alternative to enshittified corporate services. Hosting costs money. It seems like the real solution here is to work on the problem of federation between forges.
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 that's ok, noone owes you free hosting.
The argument “they can do whatever they want” doesn’t hold water. They are using legal privileges that other institutions don’t have, based on the assumption that they operate for the public benefit. I’m not saying that their current rules automatically mean they don’t live up to that claim, but it’s certainly worth a discussion.
I think Codeberg was never intended for one-off individual projects in the first place, such as them discouraging private repositories. Quoting their Terms of Use [0]:
> 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. [...]
And this makes a ton of sense, because Codeberg is a community-funded volunteer-supported non-profit, and it doesn't make sense to spend their resources for repositories that don't benefit the public.
I think "legitimate contributor community" is just an excuse so I am not going to dwell on it. From Ghostty to Redis, rsync to Linux kernel, more and more FOSS projects are taking advantage of various AI tools in a responsible manner and closing the door on them is just unfortunate and backward in my opinion. We gain nothing from this change and lose a ton of progress in software freedom and digital commons.
> 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.
Of course, and the bigger community gets to discuss their decision. :)
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
At the first glance it just looks like a github competitor. Recently I tried to create a repo there and nothing pointed out any of the noted restrictions or preferences.
I think that is a clear communication problem. Maybe the times are chaotic for them and they need to figure out how to position themselves. But appearing as just another github and expecting people to be reasonable with it's usage, is unreasonable on their side.
> I think that is a clear communication problem. ...
The following is very clearly posted on their account creation page: [0]
You'll note that [2] is the same document linked to by the commenter you replied to. Perhaps being informed of your obligations when you create an account is insufficient, and you require alert-fatigue-inducing quantities of restatement of the company's policy documents throughout the UI?[0] <https://codeberg.org/user/sign_up>
[1] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/PrivacyPolicy.md>
[2] <https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/TermsOfUse.md>
I'm sure that if we were talking about a corporate entity, then people would have retorted with how "no one reads the ToS" and "most ToSes are unenforceable", and guess what? In a world where significant AI assistance is becoming common, finding out which project is AI generated or even knowing the level of AI assistance is well nigh impossible and could be very well unenforceable.
Edit: It has come to my attention that Codeberg is a registered association[1]. It would be "fun" to see them argue about how they may argue that an AI assisted project has "harmed their reputation".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registered_association_(German...
This is unrelated to OP's claims that Codeberg not only doesn't make it clear that they "[P]rovide the essential infrastructure and organizational framework for the development of Open-Source Projects in decentralized and global communities, and other endeavours which serve this mission." and that "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.", but that Codeberg is unreasonable for not making that clear.
OP's assertions are why I said
> ...and "most ToSes are unenforceable"...Eh? Codeberg's remedy is to cancel your account and attempt to ban you if you attempt to keep coming back and doing the things that got your account canceled. Do you intend to suggest that a European or USian court would disagree that Codeberg is permitted to do this?
Codeberg setting such a high bar means FOSS is dead unless you are a company spending millions to fund something from day zero.
A massive amount of technology runs on essentially single-contributor projects with pretty much no "community": xz, core-js, GnuPG, NTPd, OpenSSL, cURL
They didn't need to make that implication or alienate solo devs in order to drive home their point
All of the projects you cited certainly have a large user community.
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
Codeberg is not saying that solo developers don't belong. Codeberg is saying that they exist for projects that contribute to an open source commons, and that spending money on hosting projects that use a lot of resources but don't meaningfully contribute to that commons isn't something they want to do. It seems like their intent here is practical, not philosophical. If servers and electricity grew on trees, they might very well would not have had to even had this discussion.
I think the path they chose is better: stay on their mission to provide free services to FLOSS projects who need it.
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-...
A couple weeks ago I froze them, when https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48842611 came up. Not because of the LLM policy as such, but because this thread https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116880003584050912 convinced me that Codeberg can not be a dependable FOSS host. It's controlled by non-developers who don't have software development anywhere near the top of their priorities.
Anyway, if the earlier https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha... didn't inform you concerning the kind of people running the show, I don't know what to tell you...
They should consider removing the word "hobbyists" from their homepage to avoid confusion if that's the case. When I think of hobbyist programmers, it could be someone making the trillionth todo app or vim extension, not maintaining curl.
Not sure how that is supposed to help the anti-fascist cause.
- 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
The amount of work you have to put in to support a complete absence of JavaScript is more than 2x the original time spent on getting the site to work and it will lead to a heavily degraded user experience that nobody wants in the first place.
The amount of features locked behind JavaScript keep increasing. There are so many essential features that require JavaScript it is completely unreasonable to argue against them.
As the web gets more hostile (2018 was so much worse than 2008) NoScript will be more competitive in spite of all the inconvenience.
Fortunately this functionality doesn't change your browser history, but it did really annoy me for a bit
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.
Ironically, I migrated to it from SourceHut because of similar rules introduced there.
They use Anubis and block LLM scraping, but that sounds useful to me!
I personally have trust in the human community behind codeberg. I understand if you don't. But my question is: why go with a non-profit host if you're not going to get involved in the governance? Of course governance is always happening in a project. For me, that power is shared and decisions are transparent are a criterium to trust codeberg even more.
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.
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.
Is anyone else extremely annoyed with the way this is written? To me it reeks of paternalistic arrogance that simultaneously exposes the author's armchair psychological headcanon about how they imagine people to work with LLMs.
> [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.
Also, despite what your remote view suggests, members of non-profits usually have political opinions. Codeberg was founded for political reasons by people with political opinions: the members aren't waiting for someone on Mastodon to have an opinion.
Also, apart from this, people having opinions and encouraging others to defend their opinions is quite normal democratic process in a non-profit. Nothing to see here.
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.
They could've found so many more legitimate reasons for not wanting pure vibe code on their platform (load, resource constraints, github's uptime since AI assistance became mainstream, etc) but they chose the virtue signalling path instead.
We shall stay curious.
If you're a vegan as your nick suggests, i would suggest to reconsider this point. Capitalism was already bent on sending us towards a 6th mass species extinction (starting right under our noses), but so-called AI has changed the scale and speed of the curb drastically in only a few years. See for example this article for recent Google stats:
https://ketanjoshi.co/2026/07/01/googles-exponential-path-to...
Recent AI datacenter projects such as Stratos (40000 acres) are on a scale of industrial destruction my mind fails to comprehend.
I'm not 100% vegan, but i'm 100% "AI-vegan", and i definitely would recommend you considering it.
PS: All i said was just about the environmental impact of LLMs. I suspect the human impact to be just as bad (cognitive impairment, accrued exploitation, etc).
Just like forever chemicals. LLMs cause a lot of problems and they should not be disregarded.
> We shall stay curious.
Curiousity is fine. But critical thinking is still advised
origin --> codeberg github --> github
I may add others. Redundancy is a good thing.
The answer is building systems that prevent that power trip from ever happening. This is why Bluesky is a better answer to Twitter than Mastodon – the company has its faults, but the approach is a fundamental step forward that Mastodon did not take. The same thing is true of things like Tangled for a software forge. It's no surprise that both of these are based on ATProto, although I'm not saying ATProto is the only option here.
you mean Twitter -> Bluesky?
Mastodon seems to work as intended
The way most users use Bluesky is no different, but the protocol is different, and it is possible to not fall afoul of these issues – data is portable, you can choose your moderation, UI, algorithms, etc, all separately rather than being forced to take a whole package and lose control.
See Blacksky for a completely separate stack, governed separately, that is still fully compatible. That's not possible with Mastodon or even ActivityPub.
If your Mastodon admin goes rogue, you a) have to get your data out of their hands, and b) have to rebuild your Mastodon presence in a new location, all your connections, history, etc are gone. That's exactly the same problem that Twitter users faced.
On ATProto, you can self-host your data while still making use of Bluesky/etc, in a way that you can't do with Mastodon or even email. You can choose who your UI comes from and just switch UI and keep everything, you can switch who your moderators are and keep everything else, etc.
Check out Blacksky, they're doing amazing work running a whole separate ATProto system that is fully compatible with, and actually the same social network as Bluesky. You can transparently migrate, at a protocol level, something Mastodon/ActivityPub doesn't attempt to tackle.
and users are within their rights to say Codeberg's actions are shitty, could've been done in a better way for same effect, and are problematic enough to raise all sorts of alarms and recommendations of avoiding any positive connotations in the future
https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... is basically insulting all single-dev-zero-user open source projects by conflating them with AI. Codeberg isn't big enough yet to be this tone deaf.
> To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects.
This seems like a staggeringly reasonable take.
I am constantly ill-choosing words I didn't mean, it's not such a big deal.
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.
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.
> so many people who have made "coding with an LLM" their whole personality
As opposed to "coding without an LLM" being their whole personality? Neither of these are what a personality is. Comments like thesen are needlessly dismissive and not conducive to a healthy discussion.
Codeberg has every right to set their own standards, but the discussion around it is ugly and dismissive of many well-meaning developers.
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.
On Tuesday I was working on my Braille 'N Speak emulator[0], an ancient Z180-based accessible notetaker for the blind. I wanted a z180 emulation library that wasn't z180-emu (GPL) and that I could use on the web via wasm, on my phone, and would have a Python binding.
Of course, this is a perfect sort of job for an agent with a verification loop, so I went off and researched if there were any standard conformance suites for z80/z180. Turns out there are a ton! I wired up my verification loops, fired off /goal, and sat back. Now, I have my library[1].
Was "AI assisted coding" "used responsibly?"
Should this sort of thing be allowed? Why or why not?
[0]: https://github.com/ctoth/qns
[1]: https://github.com/ctoth/z-core
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.
Its still crazy how much energy bitcoin wastes, how much energy bitcoin steals.
Ironic enough, if you know wwere a bitcoin millionar is, its a lot easier to steal from them too.
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!
I hope Tangle doesn't get tangled up in these backward ideas.
>sh.tcoin
in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though
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 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.
Or the opposite, as the rules are you cannot use AI, all the attribution will be removed, but sure enough there still will be a bunch of AI written code there, people will just have an incentive to mask it instead. So it ends up being a place where AI/human code will be even harder to see the difference between, compared to GitHub, where people apparently have no shame in just attaching claude's username to their commits.
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?
Gitea is developed by a for-profit organisation while Forgejo is developed by a non-profit.
Ability for rug pull is much greater for gitea imo. Gitea (organisation) already develops non-foss software to sit on top of Gitea (software). Gitea requires copyright attributions for contributions so is more able to change the Gitea license to something non-free in the future.
Codeberg can make up whatever rules they want for their Forgjo instance but you can do what you like on your self-hosted instance so I dont think that the governance of codeberg should concerning for self-hosting.
If Forgejo somehow enshittified, I would expect a popular fork immediately. If Gitea enshittified, I expect most people who would have forked already went to forgejo
It’s a never ending drama, and every quarter there’s something new to hate on or get offended by.
I’m tired, boss.
Apples to Oranges here. Linus has himself and the entirety of the Linux Foundation maintainers + outside contributors to effectively review and gatekeep llm slop from making into ONE codebase.
Codeberg has presumably way less people working for it than the Linux Foundation, and has to monitor an avalanche of codebases for slop. Of course they aren't going to be able to pull off what Linux can do.
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...
Why would you even assume they allow private repos?
Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.
It's interesting because the terms have repeatedly stated that using them isn't banned; they just don't want to be flooded with unmaintained slop.
This is the relevant part in Codeberg's Terms of Use: [0]
> 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).
The only ambiguous part is what "mostly" means in practice, but otherwise the Terms of Use is pretty clear. I'll admit that their blog post [1] is more inclusive and tries to clarify things but it's all just one very unnecessary drama [2].
[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...
[1] https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-...
[2] The proposal for this change was called "ToU extension to prohibit LLM-extrusions" so you can tell that some people are very opinionated on this.
Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.