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Codeberg isn't a viable infrastructure alternative. Its an opinionated community not a neutral host as they will delete repos based off subjective opinions on L

Codeberg isn't a viable infrastructure alternative. Its an opinionated community not a neutral host as they will delete repos based off subjective opinions on LLM usage and resource consumption. If continued hosting is dependent on moderators deciding if a project fits whatever the current philosophy is, and the whims of the moderation team, then I cannot consider it a serious choice for infrastructure. Infrastructure should be neutral. Codeberg is a social club

pojntfx 1mo ago
Codeberg is one public flagship instance. They are not neutral and don't claim to be. Decisions on what to host are made via elections by e.V. members. Other platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Tangled etc.) will eventually run into this same thing as well, e.g. how GitHub responds to DMCA requests, the difference with Codeberg is that there are elections which decide on what gets hosted on the main instance. For hosting slop or running a ton of actions, the recommendation is to self-host Forgejo directly instead, meaning that you, not the e.V. pays for the consequences, and you'd use the future AP federation support for cross-instance support. Forgejo is particularly simple to self-host as well, and lots of people do it (ffmpeg, Fedora and more). That way, you get to set your own rules and e.V. election results have no effect on you.
jph 1mo ago
Can you suggest a viable infrastructure alternative? My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU. Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.
- icy 1mo ago
  https://tangled.org https://tangled.org would love to have you :) We're hosted in the EU, and are free for open source, forever. Tangled is also designed to be federated from ground up, so you get to own your infra & data while still participating in an open network.
  - jph 1mo ago
    Thanks! Added. What is your donate link? https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-decision-record https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-dec... https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vuln...
    - TimTheTinker 1mo ago
      Tangled is a VC-funded Oy (Finnish limited liability corporation, €3.8M seed a few months ago). I searched and couldn't find a published donation route, which makes sense given it's VC-funded. To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto). Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap? [0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
  - crote 1mo ago
    What is the long-term sustainability story here? You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL. To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
- chilmers 1mo ago
  I feel like any service that is free for open source is going to struggle if it gets significant adoption and becomes a default target for hosting LLM generated code. If even MS/GitHub cannot scale to the current demand, what hope do smaller and less well-funded alternatives have?
  - voidnullvalue 1mo ago
    Rate limiting the infrastructure-hammering actions (mainly CI stuff) would be a reasonable method to handle this.
    - wyclif 1mo ago
      Doesn't GitHub already do this? (I don't know if they do or not; just wondering).
8bb6ce5638bdc 1mo ago
[flagged]
superze 1mo ago
Sounds more like a cult rather than a social club.
- tcfhgj 1mo ago
  actually it's a democracy
  - aliasxneo 1mo ago
    This gives the impression that there's a collective group of differing views that come together and make decisions. It's quite the opposite from my experience and they seem to actively chase out anyone who dissents from the collective hive mind's view.
    - tcfhgj 1mo ago
      while I don't know if your allegations are true, democracy means there is a group which decides on rules based on a majority vote. It doesn't mean that they have the same or different views at all, although some overlap is probably certain, because otherwise you probably wouldn't decide to join the same association. Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.
      - aliasxneo 1mo ago
        I know what the technical definition of democracy is. However, a lot of people throw it around as if it insinuates a free and open system where every idea can be voiced. That's certainly not the case at Codeberg, and they make that fairly clear. They heavily moderate content and view points that challenge the hive mind are generally moderated out of existence (or the topic/thread is simply closed). So, yes, it's technically a democracy, but it deserves extra nuance in my mind because it might not be what everyone immediately thinks a democracy should feel like.
        tcfhgj 1mo ago
        what got any links?
usrbinbash 1mo ago
> Infrastructure should be neutral. Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation. The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself. I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait. And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms. And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.
- ascii0eks84 1mo ago
  Infrastructure can at least be content-politically neutral.
  - usrbinbash 1mo ago
    Not even that is really the case. Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  > are relatively easy to host yourself. The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on. Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system. Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.
ascii0eks84 1mo ago
Infra should be immutable piece that is certainly not influenced by someone power tripping or being butt-hurt by conflicting alignment on worldview issues. These things should be completely detached from each other, and infra should be neutral with technical guarantees it cannot be cut off aside of warfare acts.
swedishuser 1mo ago
I'm often surprised to find very questionable repos hosted on GitHub. Such as plug 'n play malware that has been public for years. Not against it, but surprised as most parts of the internet has gone in the kindergarten direction.

pojntfx 1mo ago

Codeberg is one public flagship instance. They are not neutral and don't claim to be. Decisions on what to host are made via elections by e.V. members. Other platforms (GitHub, GitLab, Tangled etc.) will eventually run into this same thing as well, e.g. how GitHub responds to DMCA requests, the difference with Codeberg is that there are elections which decide on what gets hosted on the main instance. For hosting slop or running a ton of actions, the recommendation is to self-host Forgejo directly instead, meaning that you, not the e.V. pays for the consequences, and you'd use the future AP federation support for cross-instance support. Forgejo is particularly simple to self-host as well, and lots of people do it (ffmpeg, Fedora and more). That way, you get to set your own rules and e.V. election results have no effect on you.

jph 1mo ago

Can you suggest a viable infrastructure alternative? My wishlist: free for open source and paid for closed source, able to do simple projects that are handwritten and also complex projects including AI LLM code that needs CI/CD/auditing, and hosting in the UK or EU. Aside, I donate money to Codeberg because I think Codeberg is a wonderful service with strong commitment to free open source, and because I host some larger projects and AI projects that are for public welfare social good.

icy 1mo ago
https://tangled.org https://tangled.org would love to have you :) We're hosted in the EU, and are free for open source, forever. Tangled is also designed to be federated from ground up, so you get to own your infra & data while still participating in an open network.
- jph 1mo ago
  Thanks! Added. What is your donate link? https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-decision-record https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/architecture-dec... https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/ways-of-working https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vulnerability-disclosure https://tangled.org/joelparkerhenderson.com/coordinated-vuln...
  - TimTheTinker 1mo ago
    Tangled is a VC-funded Oy (Finnish limited liability corporation, €3.8M seed a few months ago). I searched and couldn't find a published donation route, which makes sense given it's VC-funded. To Tangled -- it's great that the core code is MIT licensed and anyone could stand up a competing appview (the credible-exit property of atproto). Do Tangled Labs Oy's articles include a purpose clause instead of the default profit-only purpose[0]? Or is something similar on the roadmap? [0] OYL 1:5 reads The purpose of a company is to generate profits for the shareholders, unless otherwise provided in the Articles of Association.
- crote 1mo ago
  What is the long-term sustainability story here? You're deliberately avoiding a network effect lock-in by being federated, you make competition trivial by giving away not only the protocol but also making your code available, and you don't even restrict commercial competition by using the MIT license rather than, say, BSL. To me that sounds like you are deliberately starting a race-to-the-bottom competition on price with, well, everyone capable of hosting a SaaS? Heck, if you don't end up with some solid competition the whole "federated code" USP doesn't play out. To me that doesn't exactly scream "good return on my €3,8M seed round". Am I missing a brilliant plan here, or should we expect a rug pull a few years down the line?
chilmers 1mo ago
I feel like any service that is free for open source is going to struggle if it gets significant adoption and becomes a default target for hosting LLM generated code. If even MS/GitHub cannot scale to the current demand, what hope do smaller and less well-funded alternatives have?
- voidnullvalue 1mo ago
  Rate limiting the infrastructure-hammering actions (mainly CI stuff) would be a reasonable method to handle this.
  - wyclif 1mo ago
    Doesn't GitHub already do this? (I don't know if they do or not; just wondering).

8bb6ce5638bdc 1mo ago

[flagged]

superze 1mo ago

Sounds more like a cult rather than a social club.

tcfhgj 1mo ago
actually it's a democracy
- aliasxneo 1mo ago
  This gives the impression that there's a collective group of differing views that come together and make decisions. It's quite the opposite from my experience and they seem to actively chase out anyone who dissents from the collective hive mind's view.
  - tcfhgj 1mo ago
    while I don't know if your allegations are true, democracy means there is a group which decides on rules based on a majority vote. It doesn't mean that they have the same or different views at all, although some overlap is probably certain, because otherwise you probably wouldn't decide to join the same association. Anyone who joins the association (small fee) can vote.
    - aliasxneo 1mo ago
      I know what the technical definition of democracy is. However, a lot of people throw it around as if it insinuates a free and open system where every idea can be voiced. That's certainly not the case at Codeberg, and they make that fairly clear. They heavily moderate content and view points that challenge the hive mind are generally moderated out of existence (or the topic/thread is simply closed). So, yes, it's technically a democracy, but it deserves extra nuance in my mind because it might not be what everyone immediately thinks a democracy should feel like.
      - tcfhgj 1mo ago
        what got any links?

usrbinbash 1mo ago

> Infrastructure should be neutral. Infrastructure can never be neutral, because infrastructure is owned and costs resources to run. All infrastructure comes with rules, be they the voting consensus of some e.V. or state-run entity, the whims of an individual on their private server, or the corporate interests of something owned by a, well, corporation. The problem isn't "neutral infrastructure". The problem is an overreliance on centralized services even though most such services are relatively easy to host yourself. I run my own DevOps server based entirely on OSS. Is it github? No. Does it what I need it to do? Absolutely. Do I get 99.999% uptime? No, but when it's down or slow, I can fix it. When the corporate platform is down, I can only wait. And "network effects" are not a good argument. Open Source was wildly successful long before centraliced DevOps platforms. And in hindsight, the added friction of getting in touch with projects before being able to send them any code, was a benefit not a disadvantage. Because it acted as a barrier of entry that disincentivized alot of subpar code from hitting these projects in the first place.

ascii0eks84 1mo ago
Infrastructure can at least be content-politically neutral.
- usrbinbash 1mo ago
  Not even that is really the case. Even if whoever owns and runs the infra would like that to be the case, the law of wherever they are can put restrictions on this as well.
rbanffy 1mo ago
> are relatively easy to host yourself. The value these centralized services provide is the centralization itself - that makes things easy to find. Remember the web before Altavista? Finding anything was detective work, guessing domains, following links through multiple pages, digging in newsgroups, asking around, and so on. Open source was successful, but not nearly at the same level it is now thanks to precisely platforms such as GitHub (and Launchpad, and Bitbucket, and Gitlab, etc) that added useful functionality such as bug trackers and project management on top of a version control system. Now, if we could do something like GitHub on top of a network such as Mastodon, then we would have something that's centralized enough to be useful and distributed enough to be indestructible.

ascii0eks84 1mo ago

Infra should be immutable piece that is certainly not influenced by someone power tripping or being butt-hurt by conflicting alignment on worldview issues. These things should be completely detached from each other, and infra should be neutral with technical guarantees it cannot be cut off aside of warfare acts.

swedishuser 1mo ago

I'm often surprised to find very questionable repos hosted on GitHub. Such as plug 'n play malware that has been public for years. Not against it, but surprised as most parts of the internet has gone in the kindergarten direction.