Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects

Moreover, the EU is a large market. If they e.g. switch to electric cars, it's not just them switching to electric cars, it's all the carmakers who want to continue selling into that market, who in turn design electric rather than ICE cars that they sell everywhere and increase the economies of scale for battery production which makes them more economical everywhere.

Germany doesn't have a "Freedom of Speech" first amendment. As far as I know that is endemic to the US.

If you dislike their stance you can host your cryptocurrency scam elsewhere, there is no shortage of git hosting services.

Which is a waste of energy.

Ethereum moved to proof-of-stake in 2022, and it was initially expected to use only 1% of the energy it used when it was proof-of-work.

Turned out they were under-estimating the savings. According to studies by the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute, Ethereum's 2022 switch to Proof-of-Stake reduced its global network energy consumption by over 99.98% overnight.

As far as I understand, this was made possible because the Ethereum protocol was set up to be made extensible like this (even though big changes like these are hard), while Bitcoin on the other hand, is stuck on proof-of-work forever, since its protocol does not allow for changing it.

Validators are low requirements, in the RPI ballpark and and a lot if them are combined on a single host.

Then you also need some full nodes to access the data or submit transactions. So you can consider them part of the core infrastructure and those have higher requirements in terms of bandwidth and speed/capacity of storage but also CPU. But still a mini PC is fine.

Let's say a bank have 10k employees, you already might need more computer power just with their "laptops".

Now Ethereum is a global network competing with all the network of banks all around the world. So you can do a quick calculation its footprint is magnitude lower.

- [0] https://probelab.io/ethereum/

Yes. That's what the post you're replying to is discussing. 'Cryptocurrency projects' is a bizarre example of a project that would harm Codeberg's reputation (which they have harmed themselves by their odd stance in this matter). If you are unfamilar with blockchains, transaction fees for blockchain programs are paid using tokens (which used to be called 'cryptocurrencies').

Democracy works ok in extremely complex systems like giant distros—Debian’s governance is slow but functional—but it seems to need guardrails around the process. (From what I can tell, an excruciating process is the best guardrail. Glacially slow decision-making means that mobs burn themselves out before they get to voting.)

Anecdotally I’ve come across a number of smaller crates in the Rust ecosystem that store their code there. Usually European devs.

And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.

It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.

Are you saying you are opposed to this on the grounds that anything could happen in the future? That doesn't really make sense. Yes, anything could happen. Yes, people change. That is true in nearly all contexts.

If you're asking in good faith, you participate in the community democratically and try to influence others. Just like normal.

There was a vote held for this decision, it was 306-154.

I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.

The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.

An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.

Working 40 hours a week is a political number.

Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.

People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.

That's the neat part, you don't.

(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)

Asking people to define that nearly got me kicked out of lobsters.

These people don't want to have to define it. Ironically, they're going to enforce their rules based on vibes. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced.

No such distinction exists. It was a just-so story made up by people trying to push the idea that moderation created a legal liability.

And it's German, anyway. The DMCA doesn't even apply there.

An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.

Everything is political, FOSS is political, GitHub is also political.

When people say "We're not political", or "That's not political". What they're actually saying is that it's within my own politics.

(Pull requests also can, and should, be sent via ways such as submissions to mailing lists.)

and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network

It's a simple rule: "no cryptocurrency projects".

Currency is a measure of social trust; it allows social contributions to be measured in a fungible unit. Cryptocurrencies erase this concept of social trust under the purported claim that anonymous transfer of “money” is good for society, forgetting why humans created currency in the first place. Anonymity abets money laundering, illicit drug trade, human trafficking/slavery, and CSAM, along with a raft of other antisocial behaviors.

Yes, you can do all of the above with USD, but you’ll have to put a lot more effort into doing so. Hence, it is fair to lump the bad in with the good for crypto (IMO) because it’s unclear how the benefits of crypto outweigh the antisocial behavior it enables. What has society gained in return?

If they want to ban scammers then why don't they just ban scammers instead of a blanket policy that bans legitimate projects as well?

And if your answer is "because they break the law" then I assume you also hate Martin Luther King?

Very similar things can be said about VPNs. Seeing only the bad to justify banning an entire category is terrible.

It's political, inherently, but it's not "only" political, or it's not necessarily political on the part of the host. As in, most practical hosts _have_ to obey US IP law. They don't _have_ to ban crypto or LLMs. The former only inconveniences or restricts me insofar as the host is unwilling to go to prison. The latter on their whims or personal views.

Codeberg has 0 paying customers. It is a non-profit providing services for free and not a business.

Membership in the non-profit requires fee paid by EU bank transfer and gives voting rights on questions like this but is separate accounting from use of the free sevices.

All this is explained front-and center or codeberg.org.

> 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).

> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.

Wow so they banned literally everything?

Their argument was economic, an economic solution would be good:

"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

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"

Ultimately, democracy is a respectable form of government and the group is free to change their mind later.

here lies the fundamental misunderstanding by many people in this thread.

Is the objective of Codeberg to host as many projects as possible on its own server? I do not believe so!

The question then becomes "what is Codeberg's objectives?"

It's not to become the world's largest code forge instance! It's to build a set of FOSS tools for FOSS software development. Look at [0], for example, which lists alternatives.

But perhaps most importantly, the FOSS tooling can be self hosted, right? There's still a notion of freedom there.

[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...

I have bunch of projects and sites there for a year+, most of them are llm generated.

What is a grace period for existing projects to move? What are criteria for deciding what is "vibe coded"? If i get banned, is the repo just deleted, or made readonly...

Codeberg had outage for last 5 days, where some repos could not be commited into. I expected post mortem analysis, not this debate!

* - the code. Just the code. only the code. Nothing but the code. You don't need the issues, the roadmap, the ACL of which human can do what, the API access keys for third parties, the artifact repos. Just. The. Code.

Somewhat arsey in my tone? Yeah. But having done two large scale (100+ repos) forge migrations of our company's client projects (SVN -> github, then later on github -> bitbucket) and seeing people completely ignore the metadata surrounding the code that isn't as easy to "just push" anywhere, somewhat justified.

There's nothing surprising, new, or shocking about codeberg banning cryptocurrency projects. This is the logical conclusion of them being a non-profit acting for the good of humanity and not for the crypto grifters.

Well, they kinda do? Go on the main page, it's the second line of text: "Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides services to free and open-source projects...". They're community-led, and this was a community decision.

> If they are now the latter, they should start by clearly stating that ideology so users can make an informed decision on whether Codeberg is the right place for them

What do you want to see then? They've made a blog post about vibecoded with detailed explanations [1], a public banner mentioning they no longer allow cryptocurrency projects and restricting LLM content and with a link to the changelog with the differences in terms of use [2].

Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?

[1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-... [2]: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/compare/17bdb39b0c1ecd0e42...

So far it is now (unofficially) The hoster of Human-made™ non-crypto™ Free Software so far it is fully legal under the jurisdiction or country it resides in (Germany).

It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.

The least they could do as a nonprofit is make users aware that a core tenet of the service is to promote/ban whatever content the community voting decides any given day, and hopefully what ideology they are following.

Otherwise any serious person would to well to stay away from Codeberg; you don't know if your project will be in the community's sights in the next vote.

It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.

I agree that this is probably going to cause some fragmentation, but I'm not convinced that it will do so in a meaningful matter or at the scale at which it is problematic to the free and open source ecosystem.

For what it's worth, Forgejo is working on federation[1], which might address your networking effect concerns?

[1]: https://forgejo.org/2026-05-monthly-report/#federation

Codeberg isn't competing against Github for market share, it serves a specific demographic with a specific ideology. Anyone is welcome to use any other host they want for their crypto and AI projects, with whatever policies align with their preferences. Or make your own with blackjack and hookers.

There shouldn't even be "default choices" or "huge network effects" in FOSS anyway. That's just another form of centralization.

To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value

subsurface is not slop and is therefore not targeted by the codeberg ToS update.

I don’t want nor am I interested in arguing whether “handcrafted” is good or bad, just positing that some people would prefer it. May not be great for [i]growth[/i], but it’s not like Codeberg is a service by a megacorp aiming to corner the market (one of the reasons why everything is regressing to mediocre slop these days, but I digress).

That Torvalds plays for the other team is irrelevant. But if we’re mentioning him, one should recall that it was ol’ swears-a-lot himself who said “fork it or just walk away” on a similar topic.

The second link and quotes sound bad, but placed in context they actually sound more reasonable arguments to me.

The "limits of consent" was somewhat misplaced, but in reply to someone arguing in bad faith about bad-faith interpretation of the rules. So it's not comparing LLMs use with rape, but comparing testing the limits/interpretations of rules with rape.

The violating of group values (which in my understanding has semantically nothing to do with rape/consent) was in reply to someone saying if you violate the rules a little, "noone will say anything" (so it was on point).

The nazi analogy was not an analogy at all. Noone implied LLM users are nazis. It's about how to interpret what is slop: the general rule of thumb that the only people worried that "anti-nazi" rules in communities are a slippery slope are the nazis themselves. The author was suggesting the same rule of thumb would apply to slop: those worried about the rule's interpretations are the ones making the slop. (a point i don't entirely agree with but more reasonable than the quote out of context)

All in all, i must say i cringed a little reading some discussions on this topic. And maybe i've missed the worst you witnessed due to deleted posts. But maybe you were also having a strong emotional reaction and the comments taken from afar are not as dramatic as you suggested?

Because it set off a horrendous flamewar subthread, containing not a single substantive comment.

> Just delete the comment if you're going to do that.

We don't delete comments unilaterally. We made it clear where it was detached from so people could find the context if they wanted to.

You're welcome to post another reply that is not so clearly in breach of the guidelines. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Once you open the door, it’s going to be really difficult to resist political pressure in other areas. The mob is easily swayed against new targets.

Would you be happy to send your kids to a school that no one knows whos the owner, who operates it and if there is any kind of hazards and/or insurance/maintenance? Lets not even talk about how and what the teachers get paid, as its all fully private.