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Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mir

Based on this precedence, if I'm accepted into the community today, how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow? If you're literally just using Codeberg as a mirror, then sure, it doesn't really matter much. But like you said, that's not what they are building. They want people to invest in the community. So now, as an investor of my hard-earned free time, I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group.

free_bip 3mo ago
You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable? Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules? If not one of the two, what is the reason? The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.
- johnfn 3mo ago
  I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.
  - aliasxneo 3mo ago
    I really don't understand the argument, to be honest. If somebody is participating in something with a perceived expectation, and then that expectation gets contradicted not once, but twice, why is it unreasonable to assume it might happen again? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely don't understand the line of thinking.
    - johnfn 3mo ago
      I think I agree with you, so maybe you meant to ask someone else? Or you’re just supporting my argument, in which case I appreciate it :-)
    - card_zero 3mo ago
      If they have a coherent set of values, then that's why. Then you have a theory of mind about the admins, and they weren't behaving erratically, but it was your original expectations that were incorrect.
      - no-name-here 3mo ago
        Codeberg has existed since 2018. Was it clear to you a few years ago that things like 1) projects tied to AI, 2) mostly AI code, and 3) crypto would be banned? If not, then what makes you believe you now know their future actions if you didn’t before?
  - nmz 3mo ago
    They won't. No company will, I think the best quote I've heard this week is from the proton CEO on the Decoder podcast. "No company is going to jail for you." If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.
    - mcv 3mo ago
      Codeberg is not a company. Also, we're not talking about jail. We're talking about principles.
    - no-name-here 3mo ago
      > No company is going to jail for you. Are you arguing a Codeberg member had a legitimate fear of being jailed for hosting others’ AI code? And GitHub/all other hosters should have the same legitimate fear of being jailed a long as they don’t ban the same? Or is this more of a straw man? Or were you bringing up that quote to point out that those trying to defend Codeberg are using completely fabricated arguments?
  - Lerc 3mo ago
    If you consider the argument of the comment at the top, that those who disagree with banning will leave. It would seem that you could expect an acceleration. I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands. No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.
- aliasxneo 3mo ago
  > You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened. This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.
  - free_bip 3mo ago
    That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed. And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be. Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.
    - aliasxneo 3mo ago
      > That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? I started with a hypothetical. Then I used an actual real-world example. I have 100+ repos on GitHub spanning a wide array of technologies. If I moved all 100+ over, how do I know I won't fall afoul of whatever the community votes to ban next? The point is Codeberg isn't a good fit for my situation which needs more continuity and less surprises, and that's been made readily apparent now. So I'm leaving, just like many other people who have been posting about it.
      - free_bip 3mo ago
        Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any. If the reason is more emotional than rational ("this feels like it's going to change more"), that's okay. Not everything needs to be governed by rigid rules. The Codeberg community knows that well. If in a few years your 100+ repos are still all fine and dandy to their rule set I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.
- cge 3mo ago
  Honestly, for me, both. While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners). But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense. Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges. And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like. (Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
  - yuriks 3mo ago
    My read of the "side projects and experiments" part of the blog post is that, in the context of LLM projects, if your project does not use resources and isn't looking to attract a community then, if only due to the practicalities of moderation/enforcement, they're unlikely to take any action against it because it won't be visible or causing enough problems.
- p2detar 3mo ago
  > You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that? I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote: > The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
- mcv 3mo ago
  Is it not obvious? They've just done it. They've excluded people based on new rules, and not everybody was expecting those new rules. Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.
lowsong 3mo ago
I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group. What "shadow group" would that be? The paying members of Codeberg e.V. who voted to pass this motion?
- squigz 3mo ago
  And also like... this is how literally any community works? You "invest your free time" in it, then you do something that goes against the values of that community... yeah, of course that big bad "shadow group" (in other words, the admins/moderators) is going to do something.
  - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
    The point is that the stated values of said group changed.
    - squigz 3mo ago
      Yes, this happens with most communities. It's called growth. As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?
      - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
        It's not analogous at all. I moved my project to codeberg because the values were one way, and GitHub didn't match my values. I pour my heart and soul and time into my project. I also used AI tooling in a fashion as I saw fit. Now I'm reading I'm not welcome -- retroactively -- because I touched "bad" tools. So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done. An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.
kalleboo 3mo ago
Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?
- aliasxneo 3mo ago
  Did it get much attention? I don't know of a single person who finds value in LLM generated comments on social platforms. The fact that Codeberg is getting attention for this move is likely because it alienated a part of the community that was previously engaging, enough to generate constructive responses. I didn't see the same thing happening with this HN change.
  - ThrowawayR2 3mo ago
    > "Did it get much attention? 4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
    - aliasxneo 3mo ago
      Interesting. Two things stand out to me: 1. dang specifically posted a comment saying the rule has been around for _years_ [1] 2. I browsed the top upvoted comments and they seem to almost universally lean towards this being a good thing. That's about what I would of expected. Although the "being around for years" thing was news to me and doesn't really make the OP's argument a good comparison for Codeberg's case. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341726
nmz 3mo ago
1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it. 2. Slippery slope fallacy. 3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2
bastawhiz 3mo ago
> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.
- saghm 3mo ago
  Yes, and the baseline amount of trust seems to be substantially reduced for Codeberg for a lot of people in the wake of this change relative to most of the other options. I don't even necessarily think the new policy is bad in a vacuum, but if the strongest argument for why you can trust a service is "well can you really trust anyone 100%?", it's hard not to be a little wary. Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?
  - skydhash 3mo ago
    It does exists for any bank. Where I'm at, the assurance is given by the national bank, not the individual banks. Anything else is just probability and marketing. In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.
    - saghm 3mo ago
      > It does exists for any bank. No one is disputing the existence of the question. > In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. Okay, so then, what actually is the banning process? The recent changes sound like the banning process has been expanded to cover a lot of new things that it didn't before, and stating "well anyone can ban you" isn't particularly helpful information, which was the point I was making.
      - skydhash 3mo ago
pooploop64 3mo ago
Did you know GitHub removes things they deem to be malware? Malware is a very subjective classification, so who watches the watchmen? How do we know they won't start removing things that are deemed harmful just for competing with Microsoft products? Hell, letting them have a mechanism to moderate the site's content at all is a huge risk to society's freedom and continued existence. Aliens could arrive any time and shoot mind control beams at the GitHub admins which compel them to delete everything at once. The only way to prevent the future holocaust is if I'm allowed to typo squat GitHub repos to distribute viruses and someone else has to pay for it. If it's not safe for me to do that, GitHub is not safe for anyone.
- jujube3 3mo ago
  Removing malware or illegal content is very different than removing things for political reasons.
  - anonymous_user9 3mo ago
    What is and isn't illegal is the very definition of political
    - jujube3 3mo ago
      Generally following the law in the country you're located in is not considered a highly political act.

free_bip 3mo ago

You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable? Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules? If not one of the two, what is the reason? The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.

johnfn 3mo ago
I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.
- aliasxneo 3mo ago
  I really don't understand the argument, to be honest. If somebody is participating in something with a perceived expectation, and then that expectation gets contradicted not once, but twice, why is it unreasonable to assume it might happen again? I'm not being facetious, I genuinely don't understand the line of thinking.
  - johnfn 3mo ago
    I think I agree with you, so maybe you meant to ask someone else? Or you’re just supporting my argument, in which case I appreciate it :-)
  - card_zero 3mo ago
    If they have a coherent set of values, then that's why. Then you have a theory of mind about the admins, and they weren't behaving erratically, but it was your original expectations that were incorrect.
    - no-name-here 3mo ago
      Codeberg has existed since 2018. Was it clear to you a few years ago that things like 1) projects tied to AI, 2) mostly AI code, and 3) crypto would be banned? If not, then what makes you believe you now know their future actions if you didn’t before?
- nmz 3mo ago
  They won't. No company will, I think the best quote I've heard this week is from the proton CEO on the Decoder podcast. "No company is going to jail for you." If vibe code is of questionable legality, then the best thing to do is to remain guarded until its legal standing is determined. It is simply an added bonus that it prevents slop that consumes data on servers for projects that nobody cares about enough to not have vibe coded.
  - mcv 3mo ago
    Codeberg is not a company. Also, we're not talking about jail. We're talking about principles.
  - no-name-here 3mo ago
    > No company is going to jail for you. Are you arguing a Codeberg member had a legitimate fear of being jailed for hosting others’ AI code? And GitHub/all other hosters should have the same legitimate fear of being jailed a long as they don’t ban the same? Or is this more of a straw man? Or were you bringing up that quote to point out that those trying to defend Codeberg are using completely fabricated arguments?
- Lerc 3mo ago
  If you consider the argument of the comment at the top, that those who disagree with banning will leave. It would seem that you could expect an acceleration. I have actually seen, from the inside, organisations implode though ideological purity demands. No two people believe in all the same things. In the end this path reduces to one single shared value, That those with different values should be excluded.
aliasxneo 3mo ago
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened. This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.
- free_bip 3mo ago
  That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? You're not worried about future policies, you're worried about the policy that was just passed. And for what it's worth, it seems like they only care if the project is directly crypto related (e.g if you had a repo directly implementing a Monero node, that would probably not be allowed). If it's just a repo that implements a generic Cryptography concept that happens to be used both in crypto and elsewhere, then I don't see what the problem would be. Again, the rules are judgement based. That means you can interact with the community to get clarification, and make your case that your project is worth keeping.
  - aliasxneo 3mo ago
    > That seems like a completely different concern than what you originally stated? I started with a hypothetical. Then I used an actual real-world example. I have 100+ repos on GitHub spanning a wide array of technologies. If I moved all 100+ over, how do I know I won't fall afoul of whatever the community votes to ban next? The point is Codeberg isn't a good fit for my situation which needs more continuity and less surprises, and that's been made readily apparent now. So I'm leaving, just like many other people who have been posting about it.
    - free_bip 3mo ago
      Luckily for you, as far as I can tell you don't have any concrete reason to fear having your repos taken down. Or at least I haven't been given any. If the reason is more emotional than rational ("this feels like it's going to change more"), that's okay. Not everything needs to be governed by rigid rules. The Codeberg community knows that well. If in a few years your 100+ repos are still all fine and dandy to their rule set I'm sure they'd be happy to have you.
cge 3mo ago
Honestly, for me, both. While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners). But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense. Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges. And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like. (Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
- yuriks 3mo ago
  My read of the "side projects and experiments" part of the blog post is that, in the context of LLM projects, if your project does not use resources and isn't looking to attract a community then, if only due to the practicalities of moderation/enforcement, they're unlikely to take any action against it because it won't be visible or causing enough problems.
p2detar 3mo ago
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that? I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote: > The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
mcv 3mo ago
Is it not obvious? They've just done it. They've excluded people based on new rules, and not everybody was expecting those new rules. Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.

lowsong 3mo ago

I'm faced with the question on whether all my investment can go up in flames on the whims of a shadow group. What "shadow group" would that be? The paying members of Codeberg e.V. who voted to pass this motion?

squigz 3mo ago
And also like... this is how literally any community works? You "invest your free time" in it, then you do something that goes against the values of that community... yeah, of course that big bad "shadow group" (in other words, the admins/moderators) is going to do something.
- cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
  The point is that the stated values of said group changed.
  - squigz 3mo ago
    Yes, this happens with most communities. It's called growth. As an example, HN now has this in the guidelines: > Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans. Does this signify the end of HN? Or does it represent understandable growth in an evolving world?
    - cmrdporcupine 3mo ago
      It's not analogous at all. I moved my project to codeberg because the values were one way, and GitHub didn't match my values. I pour my heart and soul and time into my project. I also used AI tooling in a fashion as I saw fit. Now I'm reading I'm not welcome -- retroactively -- because I touched "bad" tools. So I had to spend the last 3 days dealing with all the fall out from that and moving my project -- which was not insignificant -- docker images, debian package hosting, documentation references, existing in-flight pull requests, blog posts, build/release processes, my CI configuration, etc. etc. I'm nowhere near done. An individual making an AI slop comment on HN loses that one comment to moderation and moves on.

kalleboo 3mo ago

Hacker News recently banned LLM-generated comments due to a vague vibe check of the community. Do you feel the same way about the slippery slope of Hacker News moderation?

aliasxneo 3mo ago
Did it get much attention? I don't know of a single person who finds value in LLM generated comments on social platforms. The fact that Codeberg is getting attention for this move is likely because it alienated a part of the community that was previously engaging, enough to generate constructive responses. I didn't see the same thing happening with this HN change.
- ThrowawayR2 3mo ago
  > "Did it get much attention? 4229 points and 1716 comments at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
  - aliasxneo 3mo ago
    Interesting. Two things stand out to me: 1. dang specifically posted a comment saying the rule has been around for _years_ [1] 2. I browsed the top upvoted comments and they seem to almost universally lean towards this being a good thing. That's about what I would of expected. Although the "being around for years" thing was news to me and doesn't really make the OP's argument a good comparison for Codeberg's case. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341726 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47341726

nmz 3mo ago

1. This precedence is based on law or on the abscence of it. 2. Slippery slope fallacy. 3. Anarchy or Tyranny are not the only modes of operation. -- See point 2

bastawhiz 3mo ago

> how would I know I'll be accepted tomorrow This question exists for any service. Unless you host things yourself, there's a baseline amount of trust you have to have in any service.

saghm 3mo ago
Yes, and the baseline amount of trust seems to be substantially reduced for Codeberg for a lot of people in the wake of this change relative to most of the other options. I don't even necessarily think the new policy is bad in a vacuum, but if the strongest argument for why you can trust a service is "well can you really trust anyone 100%?", it's hard not to be a little wary. Would you use a bank if their response to the question of "How would I know I'll be able to access my money tomorrow?" is "This question exists for any bank" rather than actually giving any sort of reassurances?
- skydhash 3mo ago
  It does exists for any bank. Where I'm at, the assurance is given by the national bank, not the individual banks. Anything else is just probability and marketing. In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. It's a Germany-based institution, if Germany applies a whole sanction to my country, I'm gone anyway.
  - saghm 3mo ago
    > It does exists for any bank. No one is disputing the existence of the question. > In Codeberg case, what I would be looking at is the actual banning process, not "assurance" they won't ban me later. Okay, so then, what actually is the banning process? The recent changes sound like the banning process has been expanded to cover a lot of new things that it didn't before, and stating "well anyone can ban you" isn't particularly helpful information, which was the point I was making.
    - skydhash 3mo ago

pooploop64 3mo ago

Did you know GitHub removes things they deem to be malware? Malware is a very subjective classification, so who watches the watchmen? How do we know they won't start removing things that are deemed harmful just for competing with Microsoft products? Hell, letting them have a mechanism to moderate the site's content at all is a huge risk to society's freedom and continued existence. Aliens could arrive any time and shoot mind control beams at the GitHub admins which compel them to delete everything at once. The only way to prevent the future holocaust is if I'm allowed to typo squat GitHub repos to distribute viruses and someone else has to pay for it. If it's not safe for me to do that, GitHub is not safe for anyone.

jujube3 3mo ago
Removing malware or illegal content is very different than removing things for political reasons.
- anonymous_user9 3mo ago
  What is and isn't illegal is the very definition of political
  - jujube3 3mo ago
    Generally following the law in the country you're located in is not considered a highly political act.