Why I Regret Migrating to Codeberg After New Censorship Rules

> 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.

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

The problem I see with the change in their rules is that they have created an unenforceable or worse arbitrarily enforced rule.

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.

Codeberg already had relatively strong opinions before that; their Terms of Use also says:

"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.

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.

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.

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.

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):

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

> 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 :)