I regret migrating to Codeberg

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 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

In summary: A program is free software if it gives users adequately all of these freedoms. Otherwise, it is nonfree. While we can distinguish various nonfree distribution schemes in terms of how far they fall short of being free, we consider them all equally unethical.

I guess no SaaS meets the bar in absolute terms, but they've intentionally and significantly lowered the bar with these decisions. I'm happy they did this before I bothered to migrate. Does anyone know of a good alternative to Forgejo? I was thinking of self hosting, but now I just want nothing to do with this organization.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html#four-freedoms

Let them have their little corner of the internet and just stay away. There's plenty of alternatives run by people who don't feel the need to bring their personal baggage into a cooperative environment.

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.

Ironically, I migrated to it from SourceHut because of similar rules introduced there.

- Pick up lines suggestions – ChatGPT

- Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - Youtube

- Amazon.com: waifu pillow

When you go back to it there's an overlay chastising you for allowing JS on an untrusted website. I thought it was pretty funny. You can see the list of fake pages in the source (which has the sketchiest URL ever due to punycode + the filename):

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js

But, wait, Codeberg always had limitations on what projects are hosted there??? This been very explicit from the start, it's for FOSS and anything outside of that isn't welcome. It's one of the reasons I donate there in the first place. Now they're adding additional requirements, which most of the voting memebers voted for, this doesn't seem strange to me.

> Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom” part.

Given they'll kick you off the platform if you're not aligned with FOSS views and act accordingly, it seems strange to have associated Codeberg with "freedom" at all.

Side-note, but there is something that keeps popping up as an overlay on that page but I never end up being able to see what it is, as I click continuously as I read, and seems it auto-closes no matter where you click. Seems a bit distracting if nothing else :)

There is no sure way to identify LLM code. I could write a project by hand with all the GPT "mannerisms" for fun. I could sign my commits with "Co-Authored-By: Claude" because my cat's name is Claude and I find it funny.

Now this rule will either be never applied or when it's applied it will be an arbitrary decision made with mostly inconclusive "evidence". This is not a good way to write rules.

Write rules based on merit. Excessive data usage or licensing problems might come to mind. These things are measurable. Otherwise it's really just posturing.

"the right to use the content for any purpose, including both commercial and non-commercial purposes" "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"

So yes, "the deciding factor stops being whether the code is legal, or functional, or useful, and becomes whether it aligns with a position the platform has taken", nothing really new actually.

IMHO, deciding to migrate because of a disagreement that doesn't have practical consequences on the author is a bit of an overreaction. It is not, by the way, a full ban on LLM, as the clause says mostly LLM-generated, a term that has been criticized for its vagueness in other places, but that does leaves some room for thoughtful use.

But why stop using a service we are satisfied with because of virtual future other decisions that might or might not affect us? It's like if people left their country before the candidate for president they fear, is even elected.

  >  It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a community around them.

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.

So okay, if you're concerned about the risk of liability from unclear copyright status, I suppose that's fine, but then why the “mostly”? It's not like the copyright status becomes less unclear by you supplementing with 50% hand-written code.

[0] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...

> [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.

We shall stay curious.

To be honest though, I don’t know what happens when something gets banned from Codeberg, or anything about the appeals process, so my brain leap to the project just disappears forever; afaik the posts I read about this policy change didn’t say. Would welcome anyone familiar with their policies to chime in and enlighten me.

Codeberg sounds great, but from using it day-to-day, it's really slow sometimes, and frequently times out (from Perth, AU, if it matters). This is not just the SSH protocol for git pushes, but also for browsing.

(I do have a self-hosted forgejo (came from gitea), it's great, Postgres database backs up, files are easy to backup, it's also git so I can just mirror it elsewhere as well.). I love their self-hosted runners is super simple to host.

Bit random, but for code search, does anyone have any recommendations?

My current process is to just `git clone <REPO>` onto my server, then use ripgrep (Can't beat good ol' plain text search).

The result is that this is hundreds of GB -- I like to clone everything I use, dependencies etc, to then be able to look at source code. (I use quite a few languages/ecosystems, and sometimes reading the source code is the best way to figure something out).

I've tried Sourcebot (just for the code search, I don't care about "MCP"/"AI") etc, but was wondering if anyone has recommendations.

GitHubs code search is great, but it doesn't find everything, and it is also incredibly rate limited (annoying when trying to narrow something down, and you then get rate limited). I use this when trying to figure out random Apple issues - someone somewhere has figured it out usually.

I think it is just that people where very naïve about what Codeberg was going to be. Github has their own incentive about who they want to work with, what feature they develop, etc. Codeberg, as a real organization, made up of real people, operating in the real world, is also not free of incentive. It was never going to be this perfectly fine neutral platform for everyone. If you want the freedom to do whatever you want (in you own limitation due to the jurisdiction that apply to you), you have to do it yourself.

However, Github and Others can also ban or delete my stuff anytime. But the feeling is a different. Because now I'm thinking what's next?

Tolerance is a beautiful thing, but it can also be painful. Perhaps, in general, it's better to make individual decisions rather than relying on sweeping statements.

Banning LLMs and crypto sounds more like a move made by a fearful, angry person and has little to do with openness.

The migration towards codeberg already started a while ago, don't see how it can scale.

It’s a constant pattern.

Principles are hard I guess.

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.

To me, this is the key point: Service providers should be neutral. Especially ones claiming to be free as in freedom.

Only get involved insofar as it is required by law, and stay out of it otherwise. Individuals can have their opinions and biases, but keep them out of the platforms.

origin --> codeberg github --> github

I may add others. Redundancy is a good thing.

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!

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.

My take: If ai generated the code, let ai pay for it, unless it has been proved worth it's upkeep. Basically, show me some sort of: AI code-gen proof of work (or proof of worth, some mechanism), then you're in.

Automation at ai-scale are very expensive, just look at the trillions of USD being spent by ai companies. And let's not forget, that the rest of us don't have those levels of funding. And neither do non-profits like Codeberg i'm guessing.

And some more, i'm not even considering security issues, where for instance ai code-gen turns on hosting/platform providers (similar to chapgpt incident on hugginfaces). even if the sandbox proves resilient, the code is parasitic in nature or behaves like a virus.

The resource point is fair enough but as the blog post says they can make it a paid service for llm folks.

I think it's a bit an

Now Codeberg is free to do as it wants as am I.

(Site's down for me)

The problem in here is German laws, particularly stuff like the "Störerhaftung", and what Codeberg wants is a fast avenue to yeet projects that cause an undue amount of trouble for a non-profit organization.

> 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, through a dark blue banner at the top of the site on the day it was already settled.

You're an ordinary user, not a member of Codeberg e.V., the people running the show. Want to take part in the governance of the association, join in.

Most comparisons I found were all written with someone who didn't seem all that ideologically neutral on the matter.

To my understanding forgejo (the gitea fork) is run by the people behind Codeberg whereas Codeberg is running a customised version of forgejo. If Codeberg can just pull the rug like this, shouldn't I expect similar behaviour from forgejo in the future?

I really don't need all that "holier than though" drama when I self host my stuff. Perhaps I better settle for gitea then?

I don't think this argument is reasonable at all. Many are concerned about the environmental and societal impacts of LLMs, there are many ethical concerns around them as well, there are concerns that they could cause a bubble burst / a major economical crisis. Regardless your opinion on all these things, that's quite the undertaking for "just a tool"! This is unheard of for something like a hammer, for instance.

> 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

Linus Torvalds can be wrong at times, like anyone else.

It's a shame an authority like Linus Torvalds shared this opinion, now people are taking it even more seriously.

He considers technical merit above all else, even above what allows "technique" to exist in the first place. He always have. It might have helped a lot in the success of Linux, but I still think this is deeply flawed.

Whether you love, or hate, or don't care about LLMs, they are not "just a tool".

> 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.

In this case, you seem to have a robust democratic process, with a not for profit board, membership, voting rights and more.

Meanwhile GitHub had a better policy despite having the worst possible governance model from an open source perspective (it was a corporation, and likely mostly top down for most of its meaningful development).

But thankfully GitHub was full of great people for the first 15 years or so.

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.

It’s a never ending drama, and every quarter there’s something new to hate on or get offended by.

I’m tired, boss.

I can only imagine the backlash if GitHub adopted the same policy.

btw it was clear that this would come, and it was just a matter of time, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48087405

"People used GitHub's free infrastructure for over a decade without complaining. Now AI-generated spam and massive amounts of low-quality code are increasing costs everywhere, and suddenly GitHub is the bad guy for acting like a business. Criticizing centralization is fair, but pretending GitHub gave nothing to open source is just dishonest. Alternatives today, are probably going to be flooded by the low-quality AI generated code tomorrow..."

Being from Germany I wondered from day-one how the project's "freedom"-promise ("We celebrate free culture, openness") would eventually work out, because lets face it, Germany is not a free-spech crazed country, even less so are its tech-people and especially not the culture in Berlin.

So the idea of a Berlin-based e.V. full of German sysadmins voting on said "freedom" made this LLM-crypto-kerfuffle exactly as surprising as raw milk spoiling fast in sunshine.

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.

   - 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

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...

Yes, and?

I don't want you wearing football shirts in my pub. People wearing football shirts tend to cause trouble because someone who likes a different colour sees the shirt and kicks off. Leave it outside my pub.

People need to understand that there's a difference between "You're not allowed to do that" and "You're not allowed to do that *here*, because this is my house and my rules".

    > 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.

„ Among most humans, the need for social approval seems stronger than the desire to know the truth. Rejected by the Überclique, the Bay Aryans form cliques of their own. Blind puppies in a cardboard box, they crawl over each other groping for "scene" status. So weak as individuals, they truly believe that "scene" status is a worthwhile goal. They howl about "fighting fascism," yet they exhibit a strong urge to feel part of some "community," which is the first flash of the fascist impulse.

You all need a crowd. You all need a movement. You need to be surrounded by the wool of a million other sheep before you finally feel warm. You all have social consciences because you're zeros as individuals. Your compassion for others is ironically founded on your own self-hatred. You swim with "the movement" because you're lost on your own.“

https://www.jimgoad.net/bayaryan.html

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.

And yeah, fighting against the worst that capitalism has to offer is a laudable fight. But LLMs, especially Chinese open weights ones offer powerful tools we can use in our fight, as aligned interests of socialists, communists, and anarchists.

Codeberg people who were permitted to vote (700 out of 70000 repo maintainers) instead decided to fight the proxy (llm) and not the actual horrible (capitalists). And of course, that battle is neatly impossible to even define externally. Its a game of purity whack-a-mole with Codeberg admins playing the SCOTUS obscenity game of "I'll know it when I see it".

Democracy without a constitution is just mob rule and eventually autocracy.

I hope Tangle doesn't get tangled up in these backward ideas.

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.

>sh.tcoin

in the censorship section is ironic? Doesn't seem to be fleshed out though

Also, in 1 year tops, no dev will manually code anymore, forcing users to code manually is absurd.