I'm not crazy about this:
> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion.
Where terms and conditions are concerned I really do value "easy answers".
Specific change to ToS:
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...
> 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).
Maybe you shouldn’t use a platform that lets the users vote on policy then?
> 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.
They have no idea what "slop" is. They don't want to have to define it with any precision. Ironically, these rules will be enforced based on vibes.
I was thinking recently about Dijkstra's position on proving the correctness of your programs, and how by his standards, we've all been going by vibes long before AI.
Well, I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is. Basically everyone has some idea, see how often many different people here on HN comment "this is pure slop".
Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.
Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.
But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.
And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.
There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.
> I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is.
There's no way for anyone reading their rules to know if their projects are slop. It's full of "mostly" and "significantly". That's virtually guaranteed to boil down to "we don't like it".
So "they didn't know how to define it" is about the most charitable interpretation I can muster. Alternative interpretations, such as "the vagueness is a feature since it enables selective enforcement", are also available, and they only get more and more uncharitable.
> Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable.
Had they wanted to define it, they would have done so.
> Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.
I have insight into their actions, and I'm perfectly capable of inferring context and motives from them.
> I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary.
None of this is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, it is desirable that things be precisely defined so that people can know where they stand. Depending on the exact definition, I may or may not be welcome. Therefore I'm not going back there without a precise definition.
If I showed you an image with black sections and red sections, would you be able to decide whether it was mostly black or mostly red?
Maybe they use the definition from the HN guidelines [0]:
> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.
Does this change your view of HN? Of Codeberg? Of vibe enforced rules?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don’t care about HN the same way I care about my development platform. If I want to show someone my life’s work I don’t send then to HackerNews.
Wait, why am I commenting here then?
That rule's for HN comments, not submissions. Nobody's getting kicked out for vibecoding a project.
They will just put it to user vote, same way all their policy is decided.
> 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.
No thanks. I get enough of that bullshit in my own country.
Basically a popularity contest. It's high school all over again.
It is worse as in these cases any worldwide activist group can just pile into your small local high school and fore their "popularity" on you.
What do you propose is a better way of deciding things?
Sometimes the right move is to do nothing.
And sometimes, decisions have to be made.
Deliberative democracy is a thing.
High School keeps being funded, though.
> So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice:
> Side projects and experiments with little resource usage
> Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated
I really don't want to join a commons where something I make might be "tolerated in practice" based on a given moderator's vibe. Which I suppose is the message I was meant to receive from the issue that passed the vote.
"Side projects with little resource usage"
Wow so they banned literally everything?
It's an opinionated charity host for free software. Are you actually making free software or just dumping your junk that is technically free but no one uses? If the latter, they're telling you to go away.
That's a controversial stance. The first statement of not using codeberg hosted projects to train LLMs makes sense. But to outright ban LLM coded projects seems just silly. If the problem is that users have too many vibe coded projects, then limiting the number of projects seems like a more reasonable stance. To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them. I get that this is being spun as an effort to save resources, but this is a pretty blunt way to accomplish this. And a great way to alienate a lot of potential users.
It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.
I think you're right, quotas have been around as long as multi-user systems.
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.
> To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them.
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/#...
Silly is how it is handled and communicated. I want clear rules, not a rant that electricity is expensive!
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!
> what is a grace period
Immediate. They can be deleted tomorrow.
> What are criteria
Common sense
> Is the repo just deleted
Probably. What would be the point of archiving (what they perceive as) garbage?
wow so codeberg is goated?
No, you want to be able to host whatever code, not kicked off based on whatever the hate train is on to today.
i'm not an idiot. i can just a git repo in a variety of ways. it's just a bunch of text.
Oh, shoot. Though I don't have many vibecoded projects, when I decided to move to Codeberg from Github the first project I pushed to codeberg was a vibecoded one
I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.
They obviously care more about social performance than code.
They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.
I can't recall which, but I'm certain that I've encountered and probably used Codeberg-hosted things, and from that had gathered a vague positive impression of them.
I guess what I'm worried about is that the proprietors of those nice projects I liked (and others) might have chosen Codeberg out of a reasonable set of common assumptions that it was a place for free-as-in-freedom, as they and clearly many of us have always understood it, which were not contradicted by how Codeberg presented themselves up-front. And have now had this sprung on them, after they'd already established themselves there, and might now be facing a miserable and sapping moral dilemma, or even be directly doubting the security of their home there.
They're probably paying members who voted for this
My rule of thumb: just use the most mainstream options unless I have a very, very strong reason to do otherwise. The mainstream options will screw you, but the niche options will screw you in totally unexpected ways.
Are these comments written buy bots? It's the mainstream ones that have been screwing people without any recovery options, there were many horrifying top posts in hn itself in last few years.
That may work for software but boy does that sound like a milquetoast life if applied to everything.
“Nobody ever got fired buying IBM.”
A nice thing about Git is that you can trivially push to a new upstream any time you need.
Yes yes yes, we know. Git is decentralised, you can just trivially push* anywhere!
* - 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.
> But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software
Apple does the same with the App Store btw, are you “staying very far away from” smartphones because of that censorship?
I strongly disagree: I think this is a perfectly acceptable action. No project is entitled to host their project there, nor is any project compelled to do so, so I don't see why there is any harm in having this instance of Forgejo moderate itself as it sees fit. They have no moral requirement to support all kinds of software.
If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs. That is the beauty of free software!
This sends a really bad signal.
Why would I host my project there, taking the risk that they changed their mind overnight and declare my project inappropriate because of XYZ?
Noone is changing their mind overnight. These discussions on Codeberg have been going on for years, and you know, if only from reading HN, that a certain portion of humanity is strongly opposed to cryptocurrency and LLM slop.
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.
you shouldn't if that concerns you. Any organization or project that's value driven is going to turn people away who feel they run afoul of those values, that's the point. It's a non-profit, they don't gain anything from trying to serve everyone.
> If you disagree with their beliefs, you are free to host your own instance or find a code forge that better aligns with your beliefs.
Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. 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.
The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts. This is a terrible idea if you want to build a community.
> Sure, but Codeberg has presented itself as a hoster for Free Software projects, not for Free Software projects that align with some vaguely defined ideology. 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.
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...
> Should hackernews also mention that allowed content is dependent on its moderators with vaguely defined ideologies?
Absolutely. And it would be even better if the moderators each wrote a short summary that’s an honest attempt to describe what their individual ideologies are.
I respect institutions that clearly state their biases much more than those that pretend they have none.
Fair enough! But surely you would allow them to update their summary on what their ideologies are, right? People change, after all. And people should know when those ideologies change too.
We should also make sure people read all the blurbs before they join a website. Maybe we should call it the Terms of Service? ;)
Despite most websites having nothing but legalese in there, Codeberg's is pretty short and human readable by comparison. I know most people have been desensitized to it, but I haven't heard of any better way of coveying them at an institutional level.
The problem isn’t about ToS or other kinds of rules, it’s about what drives them.
When I join a community, I would like to be able to predict whether tomorrow, they might ban Chinese projects, or projects written in Lisp, or projects that only run on Windows.
This doesn’t follow from the ToS, it follows from what the platform’s values are. Codeberg does publicly state its claimed values, but they don’t imply these new bans.
There was a vote at the annual general meeting where all members could attend and vote.
"community led" != "ideology". That's a statement of governance style, which is a different level.
> The ban on “vibecoded” projects is effectively an invitation to start witch hunts.
It's a guarantee. Those witch hunts will happen now that those opposed to LLMs have official approval.
> 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.
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).
That's a lie anyway. I know for a fact that major open source projects have AI contributions merged into main. At this point pretty much all the ones that take over 5 minutes to compile have some LLM generated code.
You are arguing with a strawman. No one said anyone is entitled to host there. They are saying it's just a bad policy because it makes it an unreliable place to host projects when you don't know what will be banned next. You are "strongly disagreeing" with something other than what the OP said.
Another beauty of free software is they took the project from gitea and gogs before that.
It’s bad because it’s subjective. It’s a liability to host anything there now - their opinion of your product category could shift tomorrow… oh wait that already happened
Exactly. It's not so much that there are rules, it's that the rules are decided by random popularity vibes. It's not clear what vibes they will be smoking tomorrow.
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.
That was not a random popularity vibes. One of the discussion was from 3 years ago. Taking a political stand is part of codeberg DNA. If codeberg had no opinions and no politics then it would just never have existed.
Unless your project is very sketchy to begin with, you have nothing to fear. I would understand this kind of fear if we talked about a company whose CEO dictates directions every month or so. But this is a non-profit with sane individuals and debates.
Literally every rule is decided by random popularity vibes. Name one that isn't?
At the same time now it's quite clear what is codeber for. Hosting active free software projects that are not vibecoded.
It's not a dump to put anything you have stored in git.
> No project is entitled to host their project there
So tiresome. This is going to lead to an even more fragmented free and open source ecosystem. GitHub is the default choice because it has huge network effects. Codeberg just opted out of those.
Did they, though? Do we have numbers on how many cryptocurrency projects were removed from Codeberg because of this, since GitHub is the default choice? Or are you suggesting that there is going to be a significant split because of this?
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
> Or are you suggesting that there is going to be a significant split because of this?
There are going to be many splits. Cryptocurrencies. Vibecoding. Whatever else offends them.
Whether it will be "significant" or not, remains to be seen. I won't be sticking around to witness it.
You know every project or collective used to have their own website and that was fine, right?
Good. That's how FOSS is supposed to work.
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.
They held an internal discussion amongst members and decided democratically which stance to take.
> “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”
So most of the cryptocurrency projects.
> There are some levels of censorship
Except that here is no censorship to be seen.
A censor was a state/government official that approved material before it was allowed to be published. It started to become a thing after the printing press revolutionized publishing. You had it in monarchies but also republics (e.g. during Napoleons oppressive regime over europe). And even in recent time, e.g. in socialist 1) countries they had embedded "party secretairs" that checked stuff.
So, censorship as a) from the government and b) checked before publishing to the general public.
In capitalism or --- what we actually usually have --- a social market economy a company is free to get into contracts or not. So if some company say "I don't want to do a contract with people creating XYZ apps" ... than that's not censorship. It's not from the government and no check process before the publishing process happens. It is just freedom ... the freedom of the company in this case.
In some countries the freedom to engage into a contract or not is sometimes limited, e.g. if some service is very important (like electric power, water, banking). But a source code hosting site won't qualify for this.
Executing your own freedom isn't censorship. If e.g. Fox News decides to not broadcast 1:1 a statement of the CCP made ... then this isn't censorship.
But if a US republican regime says "You can't publish info on homosexuality in school books" and some government entity checks these books ... than that's censorship.
1) I mean real socialist ex-countries like GDR or USSR, not what some US people that never heard about "means of production" call socialist, like FRG
I don't know what the actual stance is, and what counts as cryptocurrency or why the decision was made.
But I tried clicking on the link cited in the OP that would explain this ( https://forum.codeberg.org/d/82-taking-a-stance-against-cryp... ) and it got 404.
And getting a 404 on a host that's supposed to host code, now that is completely unacceptable and makes you want to stay far away indeed.
The forum is only for members of the non-profit. I'm guessing the page is 404 because we are not dues-paying members, which is reasonable.
Fun fact: They deliberately chose to host in the EU because they were concerned that malicious actors could abuse the DMCA by filing fraudulent copyright claims to take down legitimate software repositories.
I guess software that doesn't fit their world view is illegitimate now.
Here is a talk from one of their presidium members about GitHub DMCA takedowns: https://vimeo.com/246282607?fl=pl&fe=sh