22 ms·

SourceHut terms of service updates, cryptocurrency projects to be removed

206 points by ddevault 4y ago

throwaway71271 4y ago
Any technology that we built is used for both good and evil. For example, assembly was used to get people on the moon, but also to navigate missiles to kill millions of people. Perl was used to sequence the genome, but also it was the main language that script kiddies used in the 2000s to deface millions of websites. Almost any library written is dual use, from openssl to left-pad. The web itself is used to enable world wide education and giving everybody access to all the knowledge in the world, and is also responsible for the fall of democracy. Torrents and peer to peer tech is also with interesting ratio. Of course the good:evil ratio is different for any technology, but this also changes with time. It feels weird to me to draw the line at crypto. A good example for the debate would be 'why dont you remove the torrrent projects as well, given that torrents are almost exclusively used for "illegal" activities' PS: I really hate cryptocurrencies :) but just got interested in: why do you draw the line there?
- ddevault 4y ago
  It's subjective. For us, it's a question of social impact. Sure, torrenting copyrighted material is illegal, but what's the actual social consequence of it? Little to none. Bittorrent also has a wealth of legitimate use-cases. For cryptocurrency, this is not the case: the social impact is grave, and there are few to no legitimate use-cases for it.
  - tifadg1 4y ago
    I find it ironic that you're moving from the US to reduce impact of state overreach (compliance), yet want to overimpose on your users.
    - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
      Cryptocurrency developers are free to exercise the same rights and move their projects to somewhere else. But I agree it's very stupid. I paid for a year of sourcehut for my account that I never used just to help the project. I'll just delete it at this point.
    - ddevault 4y ago
      We're moving from the US for many reasons; I don't think we ever mentioned reducing the impact of state overreach.
    - bryanlarsen 4y ago
      In many minds Europe is the epitomy of state overreach, the home of pro-consumer anti-business regulation. The truth is of course more nuanced, but this appears to be a move consistent with an owner who believes in consumer protection regulation.
    - marcinzm 4y ago
      If you view compliance as overreach then I find it odd you think the EU has less of it. Strong consumer laws such as GRPC are in the EU and not in the US. Even in terms of corporate finance there's a reason everyone like Delaware corporations and it's not due to them wanting more compliance. The US has other things that could be seen as overreach but compliance is usually not one that people think of.
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regresses-crypto-fills-gaps-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem to agree with your statement that there are few legitimate use-cases.
    - ohgodplsno 4y ago
      No, Venezuelians were forced into cryptocurrency by a completely incompetent leader that thought that making your country based solely around gas was a sensible idea, and despite buying millions upon millions in various cryptocurrencies, has lost over 50% of their investment. The bolivar is still hyperinflated, the Petro is still useless.
      - kragen 4y ago
        I think you're conflating Venezuela with El Salvador?
    - bombcar 4y ago
      To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive. Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test. That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.
      - sealeck 4y ago
        > it’s probably true that CSAM has some value I think you're conflating financial value and social value (CSAM may have some financial value, but highly negative social value). I really struggle to see how you could (even theoretically) traffic CSAM for "good reasons".
  - candiddevmike 4y ago
    I appreciate you taking a stance like this.
  - noxer 4y ago
    >The social impact is grave It also has a positive impact. To make just one example, millions of people make use of cryptocurrencies for remittances to send money back home. By using cryptocurrencies they can circumvent the obnoxious fees and delays they would get if they use traditional payment services.
- noxer 4y ago
  >Why do you draw the line there? A more interesting question would be "Where does the line move to in the future?". Its unpredictable because its clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group.
  - ev1 4y ago
    > clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group. At the same time there are many other git repo hosting sites that are not run and written pretty much almost entirely by a single person or small group...
- divbzero 4y ago
  Worth noting too that SourceHut is offering an escape hatch for exceptions so it’s not quite a blanket ban: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
djbebs 4y ago
Source hut is an unreliable partner and we should move everything off of there as soon as possible. Got it.
- ddevault 4y ago
  Feel free to reach out to support if you need help getting your data exported: sir@cmpwn.com Sorry to see you go.
  - fazfq 4y ago
    Sorry to see him go? From what I read you are kicking him out.
    - ddevault 4y ago
      Well, their comment doesn't necessarily indicate if any of their projects would be affected, but rather that this change generally undermines their trust in SourceHut. I'm sorry to hear that this is the case.
      - fazfq 4y ago
        Even if any of their projects (or the projects of anybody who's reading these comments) are affected, this is a sign of things to come - kicking projects out for political reasons and moving to the EU means that one never knows what may come next.
        ddevault 4y ago
        We do not kick people out for political differences.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kragen 4y ago
frankjr 4y ago
> We are in the process of moving SourceHut to the European Union, and have incorporated in the Netherlands. Consequently, the terms have been updated to clarify that users are required to comply with Dutch law in addition to US law. The requirement to comply with US law will be removed in a future update after we close the US entity. Interesting, I typically only hear about moves in the other direction. What's the motivation if I may ask?
- ddevault 4y ago
  The boring business answer is that Europe has better laws regarding user privacy and many of our users have asked us to store their data in jurisdictions which are more respectful of that. But, also, after I moved to Europe for personal reasons, we don't have any permanent staff left in the United States and little connection to the US in general.
  - minimaul 4y ago
    Out of interest, is the physical hosting located in Europe or planned to move there? I'm more likely to run a self-hosted instance for myself, but this would be good to know from my employer's PoV.
    - ddevault 4y ago
      We just set up a new datacenter installation in Europe and we're working on setting everything up. I can't offer a timeline on when things will move, but it is planned.
Herbstluft 4y ago
I'm not a Sourcehut user (yet), but the more I hear and read about it, the more it seems like the creators and owner(s) care. Glad to read this. The whole topic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has become a good marker to identify companies that actually care about their users, technology, and the product they build. Another good example here would be the (highly skilled) devs over at Valve [1]. Not just when it comes to cryptocurrencies, but many other things they do as well, like having the steam deck (mostly) open and Linux based, which would probably cause violent reactions from devs at most other companies. (Let's hope they never decide to become a publicly traded company...). On the opposite end we have the corporations and devs who just chase after the next buzzword to run after investors and to appease her holiness, the stock market. What I am trying to say is that a clear pattern has emerged when it comes to different companies and their approach to "blockchain technologies". [1]:https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-games-from-steam-but-epic-is-on-board https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-game...
- _aavaa_ 4y ago
  Seems conspicuous of valve given tf2 hats and cs:go skins.
  - Herbstluft 4y ago
    My comment is undoubtedly an oversimplification, there are tons of things to criticize Valve for. Microtransactions are a plague unleashed by them, for one. I was mostly trying to keep the comparison limited to the topic of cryptocurrencies, and the behavioural patterns observed in tech companies when it comes to them.
    - _aavaa_ 4y ago
      My point was that it’s easy for them to ban cryptocurrencies and NFTs while saying that it’s for the good of the users, while they themselves keep supporting almost identical things on their platform. They only difference being that Valve gets a cut of the non-NFT transactions
newbieuser 4y ago
what exactly is this site alternative to?
- razetime 4y ago
  a site doesn't have to justify its existence by being an alternative to anything.
  - toastal 4y ago
    No, but it gives contexts to those unfamilar. Comparisons and genres are how we categorize and understand the world.
  - newbieuser 4y ago
    - newbieuser 4y ago
      - dang 4y ago
        Breaking the site guidelines like this isn't allowed, and we ban accounts that do. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- gtirloni 4y ago
  Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc.
rvz 4y ago
- xigoi 4y ago
  Cryptocurrency is primarily designed to waste energy. Tor is not primarily designed for anything bad.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    Not the case with proof of stake.
    - NoGravitas 4y ago
      Proof of stake is a pyramid scheme.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        um, no? How is it one? Validators are paid mostly from protocol reward by placing their capital at risk and performing the necessary work to validate the network.
        xigoi 4y ago
        So the richest get even richer, at the expense of everyone else. How is that not a pyramid scheme?
        zeroclip 4y ago
        “Richest get richer” could describe any form of capital investment in a risk-on asset that appreciates over time: buying gold, stocks, real estate, art, VC. If you have capital to place at risk in an investment that gives you a return*, you are “rich and getting richer.” Unlike stocks and other investments, you don’t need a large amount of capital to receive a PoS reward, and there are less significant economy of scale. All validators receive an equal % return no matter how much Eth they deposit. Those without 32ETH capital can use pools and decentralized staking platforms to receive the same % return minus a small fee to the service who has the capital at risk and is doing the work to validate. Opposite to a pyramid scheme: if more people join Eth deposit pool, everybody including early investors earns collectively less % reward on their stake, and the equation for this is explicit and known! And the staking deposit of each new entrant does not funnel back up to early entrants. * Note: a lot of these investors are down since last year, not just Eth but stocks and other investments have crashed.
throwaway22032 4y ago
This is disappointing. I'd previously been a big fan of the sourcehut model. I can understand not wanting to be associated with the billions of tinycoin ICO scams or NFTs that are just URL links or whatever else. But to reject things like Bitcoin or Ethereum seems to me to be a denial of reality. Just because it's not useful for you, doesn't make it not useful. For clarity, I will be affected by this change and I don't at all believe my code is socially negative, but I'm not interested in justifying myself. My favourite ice cream flavour is not yours. In the end, Git is decentralized and running cgit or whatever is pretty simple stuff. I just had high hopes for sourcehut. On a long enough timescale I suppose anyone lets you down.
- timeon 4y ago
  Bitcoin with proof of waste is not just about flavour.
  - exo762 4y ago
    And yet Drew hasn't made an exemption for Ethereum, which does not do proof of work.
    - arghwhat 4y ago
      That a project using proof of work is bad does not meant that a project using proof of stake is good. The ban is cryptocurrencies, and that PoW cooks the planet for no benefit is only one of the listed reasons behind it.
      - tossl568 4y ago
        Proof of work isn't "cooking the planet". Get a grip. And Bitcoin is a fantastic benefit for humanity resulting from proof of work.
        woodruffw 4y ago
        Turning on shuttered gas and coal plants solely to mine cryptocurrencies is about as close as you can get to pointlessly cooking the planet. The benefits have been relatively modest so far.
orwin 4y ago
To be honest, this is a bit too late i think. I knew a company from the UK who sold dropshiping websites, then rug-pull ready tokens (+ website), both hosted on sourcehut (with the "critical code" sold with the support). They sold everything six month ago? Solid devs, but the moral wasn't quite there. At least they made really big bucks while it lasted.
nibbleshifter 4y ago
That's unfortunately a terrible position to take, and a shitty precedent for the platform, but whatever, it's their prerogative. I liked sourcehut, but now I'll have to recommend against using it.
- razetime 4y ago
  It's a pretty ordinary position to take right now, I believe.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The people to have respect for were those who prohibited cryptocurrency during the boomtimes, not those who pile on against it during the busts.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
abstractbeliefs 4y ago
D. DeVault running the forge, not the mint
emptyparadise 4y ago
if you do crypto i'm sure you can find a way to host your own sourcehut instance
Barrin92 4y ago
In my opinion a good and ethical stance to take, together with the move to Europe and focus on privacy makes me glad to pay a few bucks per month.
colesantiago 4y ago
This is very welcomed, cryptocurrencies have been always a net negative on the environment, society and for everyone. Thank you Drew.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  How is proof of stake a net negative on the environment?
  - tossl568 4y ago
    Proof of stake is a perpetual motion machine.
- tossl568 4y ago
cinntaile 4y ago
I don't work on cryptocurrency projects but this arbitrary decision doesn't instill confidence in sourcehut. Very little upside, huge potential downside. Strange business decision. Aren't your users there because they prefer "freedom"?
- ddevault 4y ago
  People use SourceHut for a wide variety of reasons. One of them is confidence in our strong moral compass and our willingness to make the right choices even if it could impact our profit, as contrasted with typical VC-funded operations in the market. I've never really heard anyone talk about SourceHut offering particularly more or less "freedom" than anyone else.
  - trevyn 4y ago
    A single highly opinionated founder is great until it turns out that your opinions differ even slightly. I’ve been enjoying Codeberg as a GitHub/GitLab alternative.
  - Hendrikto 4y ago
    I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for all you have done. But you are so opinionated, unrealistic, and unreasonable. Are you seriously suggesting that arbitrary censorship is ”making the right choice“? You brush aside valid criticism to push your own ideology. A little restraint and pragmatism would go a long way. You are the modern RMS, both in a good and bad way.
    - matthewmacleod 4y ago
      Opinionated, but objectively not unrealistic, unreasonable or arbitrary. There has been a clear statement made about the reasons for these actions and they are obviously realistic, reasonable and specific. You just don’t agree with them.
      - Hendrikto 4y ago
Nathanba 4y ago
Terrible decision in my opinion but I'm actually glad that people expose their true feelings like this. It doesn't affect me because I don't host with sourcehut but this just makes it clear who they are and what they stand for. You can easily expect more of these types of bans now, because why not? Do you really think that he wouldn't also ban anti-vaccination information sites? Blogs that host antivaxx content? A crawler that caches anti vaccination content so it doesn't get lost? That's just the most obvious recent example where a critical mass of society has designated something as 'the truth' and everyone who doesn't accept it is bad. I believe this is how he got to his decision about the cryptocurrency ban. What about code that measures climate information and it happens to measure that global warming is no problem and proudly broadcasts that? Anti-immigration companies? GOP campaign sites? The list goes on and on.
- rvz 4y ago
  Very good question. I'm very certain that this is where they would all be banned and it would become a very political case rather than a business decision, even if all of them accounted for 80% of Sourcehut's revenue; especially when your examples are not illegal in the US; this could be different when they move to another country.
syzygyhack 4y ago
alberth 4y ago
How much of this is due to not wanting build/pipeline servers getting abused for mining purposes? https://builds.sr.ht/ https://builds.sr.ht/
- ddevault 4y ago
  None: the mining incidents stopped entirely when we started charging for CI and it stopped being profitable to do it.
toastal 4y ago
> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. It seems a lot of folks are missing that you can appeal if you can demonstrate your project isn’t (subjective and objectively) causing social problems. I'm a paying member and a bit on the fence about the call, but I do feel a bit reassured that the topic isn't wholly banned. As the maintainer noted, inaction on topics is also political. Projects have been banned and not banned on other forges too, and I haven't seen them concisely laying out what is and isn’t ban-worthy. For instance: look at what happened with GitHub and the youtube-dl ban when capitalists in the media industry wanted it gone for piracy, but inaction allowing ICE repositories as folk cried out for a ban for being associated with human rights violations. This doesn't prevent a team from self-hosting SourceHut or another forge either—or sending patches upstream. You can't say that about the most populated forges.
exo762 4y ago
Drew, will you reimburse people who do not wish to use your hosting after this change?
- ddevault 4y ago
  Sure. You can reach out to support to request a refund for the remainder of your unused paid service.
zeroclip 4y ago
Seems like virtue signalling from an over-controlling project maintainer with a grudge against blockchains. Can you make a coherent case for why a legitimate and licit application of crypto should not be allowed on your source hosting platform? To give an example of a legitimate and licit application: Endaoment.
- ddevault 4y ago
  Legitimate use-cases are not banned, per the article: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
  - bitwize 4y ago
    And what are the odds of getting an automatic "computer says no" response?
    - ddevault 4y ago
      None. All support requests are handled by a real person, who will hear you out and can be reasoned with.
      - zeroclip 4y ago
        Is this real person also named Drew?
        ddevault 4y ago
        Yes. Hello. We have thought about spreading support requests out throughout more of the SourceHut staff if my bandwidth becomes insufficient, though.
  - seibelj 4y ago
    So brave!
openfuture 4y ago
Am I affected? sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman ... I would appreciate knowing so I have time to move and since you (drew) are in this thread this is the expedient way to find out...
- ddevault 4y ago
  I'm not sure what this project is for, but on the face of it it does not seem to be a problem. If it develops further and starts to run afoul of these rules, we can discuss it further and if necessary work together to ensure a smooth transition to another hosting provider. If you'd like to clarify more about this specific project, feel free to email me (sir@cmpwn.com) (or just elaborate here on HN).
  - openfuture 4y ago
    It is meant to solve the class of problems (in the computer science sense) that is cryptocurrency. This is because I want a name system where the definitions are given meaning relative to our economic system but where the economics within the network should converge on better incentives (which is why the approach should encompass the space of solutions; so we can find the points in that space which have good tradeoffs w.r.t. reality, our current central currency model systematically produces pollution and the motivation of datalisp is to eventually replace that system with a provably better one).
    - ddevault 4y ago
      You can assume for the time being that this project is permitted on SourceHut. Once it materializes further and its relationship to the social problems of cryptocurrency becomes more clear, we can evaluate it properly. It seems that you at least have a pretty good background on the problems with cryptocurrency, so I'm optimistic about this project. Good luck!
- exo762 4y ago
  Why you consider even negotiating such thing? Don't you find it degrading?
Kukumber 4y ago
Lot of throwaway accounts at the top of this thread, that's quite funny fun, and telling about this site Cryptocurrencies are ponzi schemes, they are scams, they should be illegal There are better ways to fight the current system than with other scams
- tossl568 4y ago
  Who is running the Bitcoin ponzi? The CEO of Bitcoin? Any other type of computing/calculation you'd like to make illegal? Maybe everything that gets hashed with SHA-256 should be preapproved by the government first?
  - Kukumber 4y ago
    bitcoin is a CIA/FED project to crowdfund the development and harden the security of the tech, to prepare for the digital EURODOLLAR there is nothing illegal there, you play with the words, you know excatly what i'm talking about "whitepaper: by investing in GreenCoin you help save lifes in africa by helping us plant trees" coinbase, binance and every other exchanges facilitates these ponzi schemes since institutions are playing blind, how do you fix the issue? it's similar with Twitter and conspiracy theorists, are you against free speech? shouldn't we ban them and delete their tweets? it's the same here, you don't give them a place to prosper bonus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012462 oh i remember that account :'D
- TobTobXX 4y ago
  To be fair, I'd say many people _use_ cryptocurrencies to execute Ponzi schemes. The original motivation behind it (anonymous, fast and censor-resistant money) is something I like, just the execution and everything that followed (monstrous energy usage, speculation, scam, Ponzi) is what I dislike.
freedinosaur 4y ago
As a keen Sourcehut subscriber that's disappointing. I don't care much for cryptocurrency, but prefer my service providers to be far less selective than this. Sourcehut is open first, so all is not lost: those excluded could host their own. On balance, I'm looking at alternatives, but might stay.
woodruffw 4y ago
A lot of the comments so far have been negative, so I’ll add a positive one: I think this was the right move, and I’m content (as an actual paying member) with it. Kudos particularly for the well-laid-out position statement. Drew and I have extensive differences in opinion when it comes to software, but his sincerity and willingness to put his money where his mouth is are apparent in cases like this.
- nurettin 4y ago
  You can cheer for your ideology, but what if your business was the one being purged because the owners profess to be the moral guardians of humanity?
  - woodruffw 4y ago
    I don’t believe Drew or any of the other Sourcehut admins profess to be the moral guardians of humanity. The “first they came for X” argumentative tack is built around the common understanding that you should stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, because nobody will be left to stand up for you should you need it. Are you claiming that the cryptocurrency industry can’t stand up for itself? I thought that was the whole point of this autonomous, uncensorable, etc. stuff.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      That's not how the argument and poem[1] goes. If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?" A lot of people building crypto tools also are happy to use centralized services like GitHub, SourceHut, GitLab, because they might not be satisfied with the alternatives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        I'm very familiar with the poem, thanks. Take a look at the last line! > If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?" Actually, I suspect that's precisely how some people would defend it. And why wouldn't they? It's completely independent from agreement or disagreement with the position.
vladharbuz 4y ago
There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree. Some things are harmful to the lives of those around us, and just as the private individual can cast a social/cultural vote against this harmful thing by refusing to engage with it and support it, a business can cast a vote in the same way against the thing its maintainers see as harmful. Inaction is also political, and I think acting according to your values is better than pretending to be a bystander. Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view. Let's also not forget that, even if you disagree with sr.ht's stance, you can still freely benefit from the thousands of hours of work put into SourceHut by self-hosting it for whatever project you want. Therefore, I think the maintainers' work should be applauded regardless of your take on this post. [^1]: This is, of course, assuming the view that cryptocurrency nearly universally causes societal harm; some people may disagree with this, but this is a separate question.
- junofan 4y ago
  It’s a political statement. I don’t think declaring “inaction is political” makes it so. Sounds like sloganeering.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    Inaction is a political position in support of the status quo. It is the equivalent of saying "I am fine with this".
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - mwcampbell 4y ago
      I disagree with this. Inaction is merely an acknowledgement that we can't be informed, effective activists on everything. I'm pretty much disengaged from political activism these days, because I don't want to be manipulated into joining the human equivalent of a botnet. Instead I focus on the one area (accessibility for disabled people) where I'm actually knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion, and where I can actually do something meaningful. Edit to add: Also, accepting the status quo on some things, even if one doesn't think it's ideal, may be necessary to be maximally effective in one's primary area. So my main open-source project in the area of accessibility is maximally permissively licensed (the MIT/Apache dual license typical in the Rust community), is hosted on GitHub, and targets proprietary platforms first, because I care more about accessibility than any of these other things. I have no problem with this specific decision though.
_wolfie_ 4y ago
Hm, I do not see any definition of "blockchain technologies" in the new ToS. Will that be added? My understanding of "blockchain" is that for example git could be described as a application of blockchain technology. First question: Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition? Second question: If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not?
- ddevault 4y ago
  > Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition? It's intentionally subjective. A tounge-in-cheek analysis could conclude that git is a blockchain, but no one suggests this seriously. The terms establish a worldview and framework around the problems cryptocurrency and blockchain projects impose on society, and it's within this framework that projects will be evaluated -- not simply on the basis that the word "blockchain" appears in their README. > If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not? That would likely be permitted on the basis of a subjective analysis of the situation. Linux is a project which is mostly used for use-cases other than cryptocurrency. After all, many blockchain tools already run on a Linux userspace, but that's no cause for dropping Linux. The rules are not written in stone: they are guidelines that we enforce hand-in-hand with the cooperation of the community and within a space where all participants are encouraged to discuss the situation and argue for their views.
  - _wolfie_ 4y ago
    While I'm still not happy about this change (well, I do not like more entries on the list now that I've actually read it), I'm happy to hear there will be a actual human in the loop you can talk to before having the repository deleted. At least that is my tl;dr understanding of the second part of your answer.
- p4bl0 4y ago
tossl568 4y ago
This moral high horsing on all things cryptocurrencies is getting really old. Thank God Bitcoin can't be stopped no matter how high the horse. We'll keep on voluntarily opting in to our own monetary system thank you very much, nobody is forcing anybody else to do the same. Keep making those horses as high as you like Bitcoin isn't going away.
helen___keller 4y ago
A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects. Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation. The fact is that sourcehut is not a corporate megalith. I don’t believe these concerns apply.
- dist1ll 4y ago
  > A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
  - MartijnBraam 4y ago
    At that point it would be nonfree, a huge step to take
  - helen___keller 4y ago
    Sourcehut is licensed under AGPL. It's free and open source software, you don't need permission. Even if the licensing were changed (something I view as extremely unlikely, since it would affect non-crypto customers as well), you can legally take an older snapshot of the code that is licensed under AGPL.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    We are not in a position to change the license terms of SourceHut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-thereof/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-...
anxiously 4y ago
I was recently considering moving to Sourcehut or Github after self hosting using gitrc for over a year. I have been going back and forth over self hosting versus leveraging an existing service, but this news and fumblings over Gitea last week have pretty much put me right back into self hosting..
- lostmsu 4y ago
  How does this affect GitHub?
  - anxiously 4y ago
    Because Github is a company I have no control over, like Sourcehut, Gitlab and others? The fundamental problem is, "Do I hand over control to entity X?" and I am leaning more heavily towards no than I was previously.
- kamikazechaser 4y ago
  What happened over at Gitea? New drama? I'm ootl
  - forgotpwd16 4y ago
    A takeover was announced a week ago (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/ https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421). This got a negative response by the community (https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471) but the owners disregarded them (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project/ https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280). The reason behind the response being that Gitea was a community-led project with an electionary process. A fork is eminent.
noxer 4y ago
Just another company to avoid at all cost. Today its cryptocurrency and most people probably aren't affected (and thus dont care but they should). Tomorrow it is whatever the people in charge dont like with no way to know what they might not like in the future. It could be anything, File sharing, gaming, something political, something religious, something containing unwanted words, a project maintained by Russians... who knows.
envolt 4y ago
Never read a better summary before - > These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community. I'm going to send this to everyone who I know is involved in crypto/blockchain.
- tossl568 4y ago
  A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people. So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn't true.
  - minraws 4y ago
    WTH my man, not just Tornedo(Or whatever) and such are criminal, but any fraud or scam in crypto should also be considered criminal. And I know atleast 5 banks with over 1 Billion in cap, went down. Not sure how that's not over 1 percent my man. But sure hell there are issues with Crypto as it stands. Also I can for certain say more than 1 percent of fiat is used in illegal stuff. Not sure how crypto is doing so much better... When all I hear are stories of Hacks, Frauds and Rugpulls. You can also use GNU Taler if you just want zero knowledge and mostly permissionless...
    - erik_seaberg 4y ago
      It’s not permissionless for payees, and seems completely dependent on certain German/French/Swiss banks supporting a protocol unfamiliar to me.
djha-skin 4y ago
As a paying customer, I am disenchanted. I agree with Drew's views on cryptocurrency on a personal level, but banning someone for using a technology before even knowing whether or not it's primarily being used to break the law is not what I had in mind. Sure, ban harassment, spam, illegal activities, and abuse of platform. But this kind of banning seems more arbitrary even than GitHub's, which is sort of what I was getting away from when I went to SourceHut. Oh, well. RocketGit[1] looks promising. 1: https://rocketgit.com/ https://rocketgit.com/
- DavideNL 4y ago
  > "We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support." Sounds very reasonable to me. After all, there is a real problem which needed solving, i imagine it also eats up a lot of wasted time/cost.
- 1MachineElf 4y ago
  Thanks for sharing RocketGit. This is the first time I've heard of it, and yes, it does look like a cool copyleft solution to self-hosted Git. Another interesting option is Brendan Caroll's got[0], which allows sharing of repositories over INET256[1]. I'm sure there are other P2P approaches to Git, but this one recently piqued my interest. Unfortunately, it has a confusing and unresolved naming[2] conflict with OpenBSD's got (Game of Trees)[3]. [0] https://github.com/gotvc/got https://github.com/gotvc/got [1] https://github.com/inet256/inet256 https://github.com/inet256/inet256 [2] https://github.com/gotvc/got/issues/20 https://github.com/gotvc/got/issues/20 [3] https://gameoftrees.org/ https://gameoftrees.org/
orange-mentor 4y ago
I applaud SourceHut for this decision.
joeman1000 4y ago
Quite disappointing. I really don’t understand the dogmatism people have for crypto these days. I don’t think most people are making their own conclusions. As soon as mass media found a credible way to bash crypto, it seems that the discourse has completely and artificially reversed. Being dogmatic means missing out on cool projects and hampering progress. I think the right questions to ask are: “how can we improve this tech to use less energy?”, “how do we stop nefarious and harmful use?”… The ‘common take’ now is to just bash crypto rather than to improve it. It’s obviously a cool piece of technology and it’s a real shame to see it just be outright slandered now.
_zllx 4y ago
I expected a bit better of someone who faced a lot of anti-Wayland dogma, which I noted as being very similar to anti-cryptocurrency dogma, most of which I am seeing repeated for the umpteenth time in this post and thread.
- imran-iq 4y ago
  Wayland is usable? I am using it currently as my display server and have been for many years What use does crypto have?
LanternLight83 4y ago
Just as a Dad-joke, this is kinda ironic; bc "git is a blockchain" :p
gnull 4y ago
One of the reasons I moved from GitHub to SourceHut is the user-hostile political activism GitHub was throwing in my face. Like including the command to quietly rename any branch you're on to "main" in the instructions for uploading an existing repo. I'm still not sure how I feel about this change. One can see it as activism, but at the same time it's still done with respect to users and I tend to trust the maintainers here to be reasonable.
Cameri 4y ago
Are projects using Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or Amazon Managed Blockchain banned too?
lygten 4y ago
> ..and grants us permission to do things like display your content on the website.. < Does this mean that all private repos on SourceHut will be made public, from the 1-1-2023?
- ddevault 4y ago
  No, that's not what this means.
lemper 4y ago
okgood riddance. and as a consumer, i applaud your decision to make it easy to migrate your customers' data to other hosting provider. it shows that you won't take your customers' goods as hostage which makes the public opinion -- especially hn crowd -- of you much better. maybe next year i will become a customer of you. i still don't have the energy to apply credit cards.

206 points by ddevault 4y ago

Any technology that we built is used for both good and evil. For example, assembly was used to get people on the moon, but also to navigate missiles to kill millions of people. Perl was used to sequence the genome, but also it was the main language that script kiddies used in the 2000s to deface millions of websites. Almost any library written is dual use, from openssl to left-pad. The web itself is used to enable world wide education and giving everybody access to all the knowledge in the world, and is also responsible for the fall of democracy. Torrents and peer to peer tech is also with interesting ratio. Of course the good:evil ratio is different for any technology, but this also changes with time. It feels weird to me to draw the line at crypto. A good example for the debate would be 'why dont you remove the torrrent projects as well, given that torrents are almost exclusively used for "illegal" activities' PS: I really hate cryptocurrencies :) but just got interested in: why do you draw the line there?

ddevault 4y ago
It's subjective. For us, it's a question of social impact. Sure, torrenting copyrighted material is illegal, but what's the actual social consequence of it? Little to none. Bittorrent also has a wealth of legitimate use-cases. For cryptocurrency, this is not the case: the social impact is grave, and there are few to no legitimate use-cases for it.
- tifadg1 4y ago
  I find it ironic that you're moving from the US to reduce impact of state overreach (compliance), yet want to overimpose on your users.
  - VWWHFSfQ 4y ago
    Cryptocurrency developers are free to exercise the same rights and move their projects to somewhere else. But I agree it's very stupid. I paid for a year of sourcehut for my account that I never used just to help the project. I'll just delete it at this point.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    We're moving from the US for many reasons; I don't think we ever mentioned reducing the impact of state overreach.
  - bryanlarsen 4y ago
    In many minds Europe is the epitomy of state overreach, the home of pro-consumer anti-business regulation. The truth is of course more nuanced, but this appears to be a move consistent with an owner who believes in consumer protection regulation.
  - marcinzm 4y ago
    If you view compliance as overreach then I find it odd you think the EU has less of it. Strong consumer laws such as GRPC are in the EU and not in the US. Even in terms of corporate finance there's a reason everyone like Delaware corporations and it's not due to them wanting more compliance. The US has other things that could be seen as overreach but compliance is usually not one that people think of.
- tmtvl 4y ago
  It is, indeed, a subjective thing. I personally have given up on cryptocurrency, but I seem to recall (and the absolute worthless rag called Reuters seems to corroborate: https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regresses-crypto-fills-gaps-2021-06-22/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/venezuelas-economy-regres...) that Venezuelans found a recourse in crypto after the Venezuelan economy imploded. However that is just one data point, and the utter lack of any real wins aside from that would seem to agree with your statement that there are few legitimate use-cases.
  - ohgodplsno 4y ago
    No, Venezuelians were forced into cryptocurrency by a completely incompetent leader that thought that making your country based solely around gas was a sensible idea, and despite buying millions upon millions in various cryptocurrencies, has lost over 50% of their investment. The bolivar is still hyperinflated, the Petro is still useless.
    - kragen 4y ago
      I think you're conflating Venezuela with El Salvador?
  - bombcar 4y ago
    To take an extreme example, it’s probably true that CSAM has some value (there’s people willing to pay for it) and you could in theory traffic in it for “good reasons” but for most it would be repulsive. Would they choose to die rather than do it? Hopefully nobody would be put to the test. That something found a good use doesn’t mean it’s a good (or bad) thing. Society is all about trying to navigate the trade offs.
    - sealeck 4y ago
      > it’s probably true that CSAM has some value I think you're conflating financial value and social value (CSAM may have some financial value, but highly negative social value). I really struggle to see how you could (even theoretically) traffic CSAM for "good reasons".
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  I appreciate you taking a stance like this.
- noxer 4y ago
  >The social impact is grave It also has a positive impact. To make just one example, millions of people make use of cryptocurrencies for remittances to send money back home. By using cryptocurrencies they can circumvent the obnoxious fees and delays they would get if they use traditional payment services.
noxer 4y ago
>Why do you draw the line there? A more interesting question would be "Where does the line move to in the future?". Its unpredictable because its clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group.
- ev1 4y ago
  > clearly a decision made based on personal views of a single person or a small group. At the same time there are many other git repo hosting sites that are not run and written pretty much almost entirely by a single person or small group...
divbzero 4y ago
Worth noting too that SourceHut is offering an escape hatch for exceptions so it’s not quite a blanket ban: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.

djbebs 4y ago

Source hut is an unreliable partner and we should move everything off of there as soon as possible. Got it.

ddevault 4y ago
Feel free to reach out to support if you need help getting your data exported: sir@cmpwn.com Sorry to see you go.
- fazfq 4y ago
  Sorry to see him go? From what I read you are kicking him out.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    Well, their comment doesn't necessarily indicate if any of their projects would be affected, but rather that this change generally undermines their trust in SourceHut. I'm sorry to hear that this is the case.
    - fazfq 4y ago
      Even if any of their projects (or the projects of anybody who's reading these comments) are affected, this is a sign of things to come - kicking projects out for political reasons and moving to the EU means that one never knows what may come next.
      - ddevault 4y ago
        We do not kick people out for political differences.
        deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
        kragen 4y ago

frankjr 4y ago

> We are in the process of moving SourceHut to the European Union, and have incorporated in the Netherlands. Consequently, the terms have been updated to clarify that users are required to comply with Dutch law in addition to US law. The requirement to comply with US law will be removed in a future update after we close the US entity. Interesting, I typically only hear about moves in the other direction. What's the motivation if I may ask?

ddevault 4y ago
The boring business answer is that Europe has better laws regarding user privacy and many of our users have asked us to store their data in jurisdictions which are more respectful of that. But, also, after I moved to Europe for personal reasons, we don't have any permanent staff left in the United States and little connection to the US in general.
- minimaul 4y ago
  Out of interest, is the physical hosting located in Europe or planned to move there? I'm more likely to run a self-hosted instance for myself, but this would be good to know from my employer's PoV.
  - ddevault 4y ago
    We just set up a new datacenter installation in Europe and we're working on setting everything up. I can't offer a timeline on when things will move, but it is planned.

Herbstluft 4y ago

I'm not a Sourcehut user (yet), but the more I hear and read about it, the more it seems like the creators and owner(s) care. Glad to read this. The whole topic of cryptocurrencies and blockchain has become a good marker to identify companies that actually care about their users, technology, and the product they build. Another good example here would be the (highly skilled) devs over at Valve [1]. Not just when it comes to cryptocurrencies, but many other things they do as well, like having the steam deck (mostly) open and Linux based, which would probably cause violent reactions from devs at most other companies. (Let's hope they never decide to become a publicly traded company...). On the opposite end we have the corporations and devs who just chase after the next buzzword to run after investors and to appease her holiness, the stock market. What I am trying to say is that a clear pattern has emerged when it comes to different companies and their approach to "blockchain technologies". [1]:https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-games-from-steam-but-epic-is-on-board https://www.eurogamer.net/valve-bans-blockchain-and-nft-game...

_aavaa_ 4y ago
Seems conspicuous of valve given tf2 hats and cs:go skins.
- Herbstluft 4y ago
  My comment is undoubtedly an oversimplification, there are tons of things to criticize Valve for. Microtransactions are a plague unleashed by them, for one. I was mostly trying to keep the comparison limited to the topic of cryptocurrencies, and the behavioural patterns observed in tech companies when it comes to them.
  - _aavaa_ 4y ago
    My point was that it’s easy for them to ban cryptocurrencies and NFTs while saying that it’s for the good of the users, while they themselves keep supporting almost identical things on their platform. They only difference being that Valve gets a cut of the non-NFT transactions

newbieuser 4y ago

what exactly is this site alternative to?

razetime 4y ago
a site doesn't have to justify its existence by being an alternative to anything.
- toastal 4y ago
  No, but it gives contexts to those unfamilar. Comparisons and genres are how we categorize and understand the world.
- newbieuser 4y ago
  - newbieuser 4y ago
    - dang 4y ago
      Breaking the site guidelines like this isn't allowed, and we ban accounts that do. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
gtirloni 4y ago
Github, Gitlab, Bitbucket, etc.

rvz 4y ago

xigoi 4y ago
Cryptocurrency is primarily designed to waste energy. Tor is not primarily designed for anything bad.
- zeroclip 4y ago
  Not the case with proof of stake.
  - NoGravitas 4y ago
    Proof of stake is a pyramid scheme.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      um, no? How is it one? Validators are paid mostly from protocol reward by placing their capital at risk and performing the necessary work to validate the network.
      - xigoi 4y ago
        So the richest get even richer, at the expense of everyone else. How is that not a pyramid scheme?
        zeroclip 4y ago
        “Richest get richer” could describe any form of capital investment in a risk-on asset that appreciates over time: buying gold, stocks, real estate, art, VC. If you have capital to place at risk in an investment that gives you a return*, you are “rich and getting richer.” Unlike stocks and other investments, you don’t need a large amount of capital to receive a PoS reward, and there are less significant economy of scale. All validators receive an equal % return no matter how much Eth they deposit. Those without 32ETH capital can use pools and decentralized staking platforms to receive the same % return minus a small fee to the service who has the capital at risk and is doing the work to validate. Opposite to a pyramid scheme: if more people join Eth deposit pool, everybody including early investors earns collectively less % reward on their stake, and the equation for this is explicit and known! And the staking deposit of each new entrant does not funnel back up to early entrants. * Note: a lot of these investors are down since last year, not just Eth but stocks and other investments have crashed.

throwaway22032 4y ago

This is disappointing. I'd previously been a big fan of the sourcehut model. I can understand not wanting to be associated with the billions of tinycoin ICO scams or NFTs that are just URL links or whatever else. But to reject things like Bitcoin or Ethereum seems to me to be a denial of reality. Just because it's not useful for you, doesn't make it not useful. For clarity, I will be affected by this change and I don't at all believe my code is socially negative, but I'm not interested in justifying myself. My favourite ice cream flavour is not yours. In the end, Git is decentralized and running cgit or whatever is pretty simple stuff. I just had high hopes for sourcehut. On a long enough timescale I suppose anyone lets you down.

timeon 4y ago
Bitcoin with proof of waste is not just about flavour.
- exo762 4y ago
  And yet Drew hasn't made an exemption for Ethereum, which does not do proof of work.
  - arghwhat 4y ago
    That a project using proof of work is bad does not meant that a project using proof of stake is good. The ban is cryptocurrencies, and that PoW cooks the planet for no benefit is only one of the listed reasons behind it.
    - tossl568 4y ago
      Proof of work isn't "cooking the planet". Get a grip. And Bitcoin is a fantastic benefit for humanity resulting from proof of work.
      - woodruffw 4y ago
        Turning on shuttered gas and coal plants solely to mine cryptocurrencies is about as close as you can get to pointlessly cooking the planet. The benefits have been relatively modest so far.

orwin 4y ago

To be honest, this is a bit too late i think. I knew a company from the UK who sold dropshiping websites, then rug-pull ready tokens (+ website), both hosted on sourcehut (with the "critical code" sold with the support). They sold everything six month ago? Solid devs, but the moral wasn't quite there. At least they made really big bucks while it lasted.

nibbleshifter 4y ago

That's unfortunately a terrible position to take, and a shitty precedent for the platform, but whatever, it's their prerogative. I liked sourcehut, but now I'll have to recommend against using it.

razetime 4y ago
It's a pretty ordinary position to take right now, I believe.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The people to have respect for were those who prohibited cryptocurrency during the boomtimes, not those who pile on against it during the busts.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

abstractbeliefs 4y ago

D. DeVault running the forge, not the mint

emptyparadise 4y ago

if you do crypto i'm sure you can find a way to host your own sourcehut instance

Barrin92 4y ago

In my opinion a good and ethical stance to take, together with the move to Europe and focus on privacy makes me glad to pay a few bucks per month.

colesantiago 4y ago

This is very welcomed, cryptocurrencies have been always a net negative on the environment, society and for everyone. Thank you Drew.

zeroclip 4y ago
How is proof of stake a net negative on the environment?
- tossl568 4y ago
  Proof of stake is a perpetual motion machine.
tossl568 4y ago

cinntaile 4y ago

I don't work on cryptocurrency projects but this arbitrary decision doesn't instill confidence in sourcehut. Very little upside, huge potential downside. Strange business decision. Aren't your users there because they prefer "freedom"?

ddevault 4y ago
People use SourceHut for a wide variety of reasons. One of them is confidence in our strong moral compass and our willingness to make the right choices even if it could impact our profit, as contrasted with typical VC-funded operations in the market. I've never really heard anyone talk about SourceHut offering particularly more or less "freedom" than anyone else.
- trevyn 4y ago
  A single highly opinionated founder is great until it turns out that your opinions differ even slightly. I’ve been enjoying Codeberg as a GitHub/GitLab alternative.
- Hendrikto 4y ago
  I am a huge fan of your work. Thanks for all you have done. But you are so opinionated, unrealistic, and unreasonable. Are you seriously suggesting that arbitrary censorship is ”making the right choice“? You brush aside valid criticism to push your own ideology. A little restraint and pragmatism would go a long way. You are the modern RMS, both in a good and bad way.
  - matthewmacleod 4y ago
    Opinionated, but objectively not unrealistic, unreasonable or arbitrary. There has been a clear statement made about the reasons for these actions and they are obviously realistic, reasonable and specific. You just don’t agree with them.
    - Hendrikto 4y ago

Nathanba 4y ago

Terrible decision in my opinion but I'm actually glad that people expose their true feelings like this. It doesn't affect me because I don't host with sourcehut but this just makes it clear who they are and what they stand for. You can easily expect more of these types of bans now, because why not? Do you really think that he wouldn't also ban anti-vaccination information sites? Blogs that host antivaxx content? A crawler that caches anti vaccination content so it doesn't get lost? That's just the most obvious recent example where a critical mass of society has designated something as 'the truth' and everyone who doesn't accept it is bad. I believe this is how he got to his decision about the cryptocurrency ban. What about code that measures climate information and it happens to measure that global warming is no problem and proudly broadcasts that? Anti-immigration companies? GOP campaign sites? The list goes on and on.

rvz 4y ago
Very good question. I'm very certain that this is where they would all be banned and it would become a very political case rather than a business decision, even if all of them accounted for 80% of Sourcehut's revenue; especially when your examples are not illegal in the US; this could be different when they move to another country.

syzygyhack 4y ago

alberth 4y ago

How much of this is due to not wanting build/pipeline servers getting abused for mining purposes? https://builds.sr.ht/ https://builds.sr.ht/

ddevault 4y ago
None: the mining incidents stopped entirely when we started charging for CI and it stopped being profitable to do it.

toastal 4y ago

> We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support. It seems a lot of folks are missing that you can appeal if you can demonstrate your project isn’t (subjective and objectively) causing social problems. I'm a paying member and a bit on the fence about the call, but I do feel a bit reassured that the topic isn't wholly banned. As the maintainer noted, inaction on topics is also political. Projects have been banned and not banned on other forges too, and I haven't seen them concisely laying out what is and isn’t ban-worthy. For instance: look at what happened with GitHub and the youtube-dl ban when capitalists in the media industry wanted it gone for piracy, but inaction allowing ICE repositories as folk cried out for a ban for being associated with human rights violations. This doesn't prevent a team from self-hosting SourceHut or another forge either—or sending patches upstream. You can't say that about the most populated forges.

exo762 4y ago

Drew, will you reimburse people who do not wish to use your hosting after this change?

ddevault 4y ago
Sure. You can reach out to support to request a refund for the remainder of your unused paid service.

zeroclip 4y ago

Seems like virtue signalling from an over-controlling project maintainer with a grudge against blockchains. Can you make a coherent case for why a legitimate and licit application of crypto should not be allowed on your source hosting platform? To give an example of a legitimate and licit application: Endaoment.

ddevault 4y ago
Legitimate use-cases are not banned, per the article: > We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support.
- bitwize 4y ago
  And what are the odds of getting an automatic "computer says no" response?
  - ddevault 4y ago
    None. All support requests are handled by a real person, who will hear you out and can be reasoned with.
    - zeroclip 4y ago
      Is this real person also named Drew?
      - ddevault 4y ago
        Yes. Hello. We have thought about spreading support requests out throughout more of the SourceHut staff if my bandwidth becomes insufficient, though.
- seibelj 4y ago
  So brave!

openfuture 4y ago

Am I affected? sr.ht/~ilmu/tala.saman ... I would appreciate knowing so I have time to move and since you (drew) are in this thread this is the expedient way to find out...

ddevault 4y ago
I'm not sure what this project is for, but on the face of it it does not seem to be a problem. If it develops further and starts to run afoul of these rules, we can discuss it further and if necessary work together to ensure a smooth transition to another hosting provider. If you'd like to clarify more about this specific project, feel free to email me (sir@cmpwn.com) (or just elaborate here on HN).
- openfuture 4y ago
  It is meant to solve the class of problems (in the computer science sense) that is cryptocurrency. This is because I want a name system where the definitions are given meaning relative to our economic system but where the economics within the network should converge on better incentives (which is why the approach should encompass the space of solutions; so we can find the points in that space which have good tradeoffs w.r.t. reality, our current central currency model systematically produces pollution and the motivation of datalisp is to eventually replace that system with a provably better one).
  - ddevault 4y ago
    You can assume for the time being that this project is permitted on SourceHut. Once it materializes further and its relationship to the social problems of cryptocurrency becomes more clear, we can evaluate it properly. It seems that you at least have a pretty good background on the problems with cryptocurrency, so I'm optimistic about this project. Good luck!
exo762 4y ago
Why you consider even negotiating such thing? Don't you find it degrading?

Kukumber 4y ago

Lot of throwaway accounts at the top of this thread, that's quite funny fun, and telling about this site Cryptocurrencies are ponzi schemes, they are scams, they should be illegal There are better ways to fight the current system than with other scams

tossl568 4y ago
Who is running the Bitcoin ponzi? The CEO of Bitcoin? Any other type of computing/calculation you'd like to make illegal? Maybe everything that gets hashed with SHA-256 should be preapproved by the government first?
- Kukumber 4y ago
  bitcoin is a CIA/FED project to crowdfund the development and harden the security of the tech, to prepare for the digital EURODOLLAR there is nothing illegal there, you play with the words, you know excatly what i'm talking about "whitepaper: by investing in GreenCoin you help save lifes in africa by helping us plant trees" coinbase, binance and every other exchanges facilitates these ponzi schemes since institutions are playing blind, how do you fix the issue? it's similar with Twitter and conspiracy theorists, are you against free speech? shouldn't we ban them and delete their tweets? it's the same here, you don't give them a place to prosper bonus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012462 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31012462 oh i remember that account :'D
TobTobXX 4y ago
To be fair, I'd say many people _use_ cryptocurrencies to execute Ponzi schemes. The original motivation behind it (anonymous, fast and censor-resistant money) is something I like, just the execution and everything that followed (monstrous energy usage, speculation, scam, Ponzi) is what I dislike.

freedinosaur 4y ago

As a keen Sourcehut subscriber that's disappointing. I don't care much for cryptocurrency, but prefer my service providers to be far less selective than this. Sourcehut is open first, so all is not lost: those excluded could host their own. On balance, I'm looking at alternatives, but might stay.

woodruffw 4y ago

A lot of the comments so far have been negative, so I’ll add a positive one: I think this was the right move, and I’m content (as an actual paying member) with it. Kudos particularly for the well-laid-out position statement. Drew and I have extensive differences in opinion when it comes to software, but his sincerity and willingness to put his money where his mouth is are apparent in cases like this.

nurettin 4y ago
You can cheer for your ideology, but what if your business was the one being purged because the owners profess to be the moral guardians of humanity?
- woodruffw 4y ago
  I don’t believe Drew or any of the other Sourcehut admins profess to be the moral guardians of humanity. The “first they came for X” argumentative tack is built around the common understanding that you should stand up for those who can’t stand up for themselves, because nobody will be left to stand up for you should you need it. Are you claiming that the cryptocurrency industry can’t stand up for itself? I thought that was the whole point of this autonomous, uncensorable, etc. stuff.
  - zeroclip 4y ago
    That's not how the argument and poem[1] goes. If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?" A lot of people building crypto tools also are happy to use centralized services like GitHub, SourceHut, GitLab, because they might not be satisfied with the alternatives. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...
    - woodruffw 4y ago
      I'm very familiar with the poem, thanks. Take a look at the last line! > If a devops team for a pro-choice campaign was being censored on SourceHut because it does not align with Drew's moral compass, nobody would defend this with "well, they can just run their own git hosting services, so what's the problem?" Actually, I suspect that's precisely how some people would defend it. And why wouldn't they? It's completely independent from agreement or disagreement with the position.

vladharbuz 4y ago

There are people here who seem to take the view that businesses hosting the content of others ought to absolutely protect their "freedom of speech", no matter the content. I disagree. Some things are harmful to the lives of those around us, and just as the private individual can cast a social/cultural vote against this harmful thing by refusing to engage with it and support it, a business can cast a vote in the same way against the thing its maintainers see as harmful. Inaction is also political, and I think acting according to your values is better than pretending to be a bystander. Put yourself in the maintainers' shoes — would you be happy to idly stand by when you know your service is being used to actively harm others' lives? [^1] Perhaps you would, and if so, I would be interested in hearing your view. Let's also not forget that, even if you disagree with sr.ht's stance, you can still freely benefit from the thousands of hours of work put into SourceHut by self-hosting it for whatever project you want. Therefore, I think the maintainers' work should be applauded regardless of your take on this post. [^1]: This is, of course, assuming the view that cryptocurrency nearly universally causes societal harm; some people may disagree with this, but this is a separate question.

junofan 4y ago
It’s a political statement. I don’t think declaring “inaction is political” makes it so. Sounds like sloganeering.
- ddevault 4y ago
  Inaction is a political position in support of the status quo. It is the equivalent of saying "I am fine with this".
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - mwcampbell 4y ago
    I disagree with this. Inaction is merely an acknowledgement that we can't be informed, effective activists on everything. I'm pretty much disengaged from political activism these days, because I don't want to be manipulated into joining the human equivalent of a botnet. Instead I focus on the one area (accessibility for disabled people) where I'm actually knowledgeable enough to have an informed opinion, and where I can actually do something meaningful. Edit to add: Also, accepting the status quo on some things, even if one doesn't think it's ideal, may be necessary to be maximally effective in one's primary area. So my main open-source project in the area of accessibility is maximally permissively licensed (the MIT/Apache dual license typical in the Rust community), is hosted on GitHub, and targets proprietary platforms first, because I care more about accessibility than any of these other things. I have no problem with this specific decision though.

_wolfie_ 4y ago

Hm, I do not see any definition of "blockchain technologies" in the new ToS. Will that be added? My understanding of "blockchain" is that for example git could be described as a application of blockchain technology. First question: Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition? Second question: If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not?

ddevault 4y ago
> Will there be further clarification regarding what is the precise definition? It's intentionally subjective. A tounge-in-cheek analysis could conclude that git is a blockchain, but no one suggests this seriously. The terms establish a worldview and framework around the problems cryptocurrency and blockchain projects impose on society, and it's within this framework that projects will be evaluated -- not simply on the basis that the word "blockchain" appears in their README. > If there will be some HW accelerator thingie or something for blockchain technologies or cryptocurrency, and the driver for that gets merged into upstream linux kernel, will that make linux kernel un-hostable on sourcehut? If not, why not? That would likely be permitted on the basis of a subjective analysis of the situation. Linux is a project which is mostly used for use-cases other than cryptocurrency. After all, many blockchain tools already run on a Linux userspace, but that's no cause for dropping Linux. The rules are not written in stone: they are guidelines that we enforce hand-in-hand with the cooperation of the community and within a space where all participants are encouraged to discuss the situation and argue for their views.
- _wolfie_ 4y ago
  While I'm still not happy about this change (well, I do not like more entries on the list now that I've actually read it), I'm happy to hear there will be a actual human in the loop you can talk to before having the repository deleted. At least that is my tl;dr understanding of the second part of your answer.
p4bl0 4y ago

tossl568 4y ago

This moral high horsing on all things cryptocurrencies is getting really old. Thank God Bitcoin can't be stopped no matter how high the horse. We'll keep on voluntarily opting in to our own monetary system thank you very much, nobody is forcing anybody else to do the same. Keep making those horses as high as you like Bitcoin isn't going away.

helen___keller 4y ago

A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform, so I feel significantly better about this than if say GitHub banned all crypto projects. Corporate megaliths have left everyone wary of platforms banning an entire topic or idea. Between shitty automation, unreachable support, and large blast radii, corporate megaliths are generally untrustworthy with moderation. The fact is that sourcehut is not a corporate megalith. I don’t believe these concerns apply.

dist1ll 4y ago
> A platform like sourcehut is designed to be self hosted and to allow you to migrate off platform Sounds nice in theory, until SourceHut changes the licensing terms to forbid self-hosting of certain projects. At this point, I'd rather trust GitHub. At least they don't have a personal vendetta against crypto.
- MartijnBraam 4y ago
  At that point it would be nonfree, a huge step to take
- helen___keller 4y ago
  Sourcehut is licensed under AGPL. It's free and open source software, you don't need permission. Even if the licensing were changed (something I view as extremely unlikely, since it would affect non-crypto customers as well), you can legally take an older snapshot of the code that is licensed under AGPL.
- ddevault 4y ago
  We are not in a position to change the license terms of SourceHut: https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-thereof/ https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-09-ip-assignment-or-lack-...

anxiously 4y ago

I was recently considering moving to Sourcehut or Github after self hosting using gitrc for over a year. I have been going back and forth over self hosting versus leveraging an existing service, but this news and fumblings over Gitea last week have pretty much put me right back into self hosting..

lostmsu 4y ago
How does this affect GitHub?
- anxiously 4y ago
  Because Github is a company I have no control over, like Sourcehut, Gitlab and others? The fundamental problem is, "Do I hand over control to entity X?" and I am leaning more heavily towards no than I was previously.
kamikazechaser 4y ago
What happened over at Gitea? New drama? I'm ootl
- forgotpwd16 4y ago
  A takeover was announced a week ago (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-the-future-of-gitea/ https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/open-source-sustainment-and-th... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33339421). This got a negative response by the community (https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ https://gitea-open-letter.coding.social/ ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33372471) but the owners disregarded them (https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gitea-project/ https://blog.gitea.io/2022/10/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-... ; discussed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33394280). The reason behind the response being that Gitea was a community-led project with an electionary process. A fork is eminent.

noxer 4y ago

Just another company to avoid at all cost. Today its cryptocurrency and most people probably aren't affected (and thus dont care but they should). Tomorrow it is whatever the people in charge dont like with no way to know what they might not like in the future. It could be anything, File sharing, gaming, something political, something religious, something containing unwanted words, a project maintained by Russians... who knows.

envolt 4y ago

Never read a better summary before - > These domains are strongly associated with fraudulent activities and high-risk investments which take advantage of people who are suffering from economic hardship and growing global wealth inequality. Few to no legitimate use-cases for this technology have been found; instead it is mostly used for fraudulent “get rich quick” schemes and to facilitate criminal activity, such as ransomware, illicit trade, and sanctions evasion. These projects often encourage large-scale energy waste and electronics waste, which contributes to the declining health of Earth’s environment. The presence of these projects on SourceHut exposes new victims to these scams and is harmful to the reputation of SourceHut and its community. I'm going to send this to everyone who I know is involved in crypto/blockchain.

tossl568 4y ago
A monetary unit that can't be debased running on an open, permissionless financial network anybody can use is the use-case. The big and only use case. Research suggests less than 1% of "crypto" usage is for criminal activity. Energy isn't fungible and it isn't wasted if it's securing hundreds of billions of value for hundreds of millions of people. So maybe you shouldn't send something to everyone you know if it isn't true.
- minraws 4y ago
  WTH my man, not just Tornedo(Or whatever) and such are criminal, but any fraud or scam in crypto should also be considered criminal. And I know atleast 5 banks with over 1 Billion in cap, went down. Not sure how that's not over 1 percent my man. But sure hell there are issues with Crypto as it stands. Also I can for certain say more than 1 percent of fiat is used in illegal stuff. Not sure how crypto is doing so much better... When all I hear are stories of Hacks, Frauds and Rugpulls. You can also use GNU Taler if you just want zero knowledge and mostly permissionless...
  - erik_seaberg 4y ago
    It’s not permissionless for payees, and seems completely dependent on certain German/French/Swiss banks supporting a protocol unfamiliar to me.

djha-skin 4y ago

As a paying customer, I am disenchanted. I agree with Drew's views on cryptocurrency on a personal level, but banning someone for using a technology before even knowing whether or not it's primarily being used to break the law is not what I had in mind. Sure, ban harassment, spam, illegal activities, and abuse of platform. But this kind of banning seems more arbitrary even than GitHub's, which is sort of what I was getting away from when I went to SourceHut. Oh, well. RocketGit[1] looks promising. 1: https://rocketgit.com/ https://rocketgit.com/

DavideNL 4y ago
> "We will exercise discretion when applying this rule. If you believe that your use-case for cryptocurrency or blockchain is not plagued by these social problems, you may ask for permission to host it on SourceHut, or appeal its removal, by contacting support." Sounds very reasonable to me. After all, there is a real problem which needed solving, i imagine it also eats up a lot of wasted time/cost.
1MachineElf 4y ago
Thanks for sharing RocketGit. This is the first time I've heard of it, and yes, it does look like a cool copyleft solution to self-hosted Git. Another interesting option is Brendan Caroll's got[0], which allows sharing of repositories over INET256[1]. I'm sure there are other P2P approaches to Git, but this one recently piqued my interest. Unfortunately, it has a confusing and unresolved naming[2] conflict with OpenBSD's got (Game of Trees)[3]. [0] https://github.com/gotvc/got https://github.com/gotvc/got [1] https://github.com/inet256/inet256 https://github.com/inet256/inet256 [2] https://github.com/gotvc/got/issues/20 https://github.com/gotvc/got/issues/20 [3] https://gameoftrees.org/ https://gameoftrees.org/

orange-mentor 4y ago

I applaud SourceHut for this decision.

joeman1000 4y ago

Quite disappointing. I really don’t understand the dogmatism people have for crypto these days. I don’t think most people are making their own conclusions. As soon as mass media found a credible way to bash crypto, it seems that the discourse has completely and artificially reversed. Being dogmatic means missing out on cool projects and hampering progress. I think the right questions to ask are: “how can we improve this tech to use less energy?”, “how do we stop nefarious and harmful use?”… The ‘common take’ now is to just bash crypto rather than to improve it. It’s obviously a cool piece of technology and it’s a real shame to see it just be outright slandered now.

_zllx 4y ago

I expected a bit better of someone who faced a lot of anti-Wayland dogma, which I noted as being very similar to anti-cryptocurrency dogma, most of which I am seeing repeated for the umpteenth time in this post and thread.

imran-iq 4y ago
Wayland is usable? I am using it currently as my display server and have been for many years What use does crypto have?

LanternLight83 4y ago

Just as a Dad-joke, this is kinda ironic; bc "git is a blockchain" :p

gnull 4y ago

One of the reasons I moved from GitHub to SourceHut is the user-hostile political activism GitHub was throwing in my face. Like including the command to quietly rename any branch you're on to "main" in the instructions for uploading an existing repo. I'm still not sure how I feel about this change. One can see it as activism, but at the same time it's still done with respect to users and I tend to trust the maintainers here to be reasonable.

Cameri 4y ago

Are projects using Amazon Quantum Ledger Database or Amazon Managed Blockchain banned too?

lygten 4y ago

> ..and grants us permission to do things like display your content on the website.. < Does this mean that all private repos on SourceHut will be made public, from the 1-1-2023?

ddevault 4y ago
No, that's not what this means.

lemper 4y ago

okgood riddance. and as a consumer, i applaud your decision to make it easy to migrate your customers' data to other hosting provider. it shows that you won't take your customers' goods as hostage which makes the public opinion -- especially hn crowd -- of you much better. maybe next year i will become a customer of you. i still don't have the energy to apply credit cards.