Right - I see the other topic has been locked / author hasn’t returned to follow community rules.
Here’s the original topic https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
and a measured (IMHO) response to it. (BTW, do your self a favour and change tabs with that site open :)
https://マリウス.com/i-regret-migrating-to-codeberg/
It’s a tough spot, Codeberg has found themselves in and I wish them luck. But beyond that, this is (yet) another reminder that in 2026, if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
You must log in or # to comment.
Frankly, I don’t see where the whole big deal of this story is.
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else (even back to github) and/or found/support an alternative that better suits their needs.
It’s not like the world needs to have one git hosting service to rule them all, it’s not like there must be free ones (entitled much?), and it’s not like whatever service happens to be the new “cool” one must be neutral as to what they host.
BTW, although to my knowledge their policy is not enforced super-strictly, codeberg has never been neutral in this regard — see 1 and 2
People who don’t like codeberg can just go somewhere else
Didn’t down vote ya but…This. This is what I’ve been saying for forever.
I agree, but I believe that there must be free git hosting and archiving for code projects.
What’s stopping you from doing it yourself? Be the change you want to see.
I fail to see why people are getting worked up. While yes the tos says the ambiguous “mostly” the rest of the paragraph gives you a clear indication why. Copyright. Which I the same reason many other platforms don’t level allow vibe code into their codebases.
CB does not want to host code a large number of repos that in the future could be classified as stolen code, and now as the code host will have to do the work of deleting it all when they get sued for hosting it. And you know right holders are just waiting to do that.
It’s more than just the ‘mostly’. In legal proceedings they would really struggle to ‘demonstrate cause’, i.e. what is copyrighted, and what is not - not to mention demonstrating criminal intent.
As I wrote before, these are phase 2 effects of a new emerging technology. All it will take is one company to go after them in court to reverse this.
I’ll offer a comparison not yet mentioned in the context of hosting software, but which should sound familiar in the social media context: moderation is hard at scale.
By every metric of scale, Codeberg is a competitor to the behemoth that is GitHub. And that means they have to contend with tough choices, such as who and what to host on their servers, no different than BlueSky, Facebook, and the individual instances of the Fediverse. And to be clear, Codeberg has always been limited to FOSS projects anyway, so nobody can genuinely argue that limits weren’t in the cards.
The distinction is that less alike Meta, and more alike with the Fediverse, Codeberg takes no hostages: people with obvious AI repos (or even marginal repos, given the possible ambiguity) are free to take their code and leave. Yes, they have to rebuild their CI pipelines, but that’s always required for any platform, including self hosting.
The fact is that Codeberg is a centralized entity that needs to (try to) make consistent policy. In this case, they have a concern about copyright and nothing anyone says can magically dematerialize that risk. If their new policy is not agreeable, then decentralized self hosting is probably the only way forward. But that was always an option with ForgeJo and federation.
And indeed, folks moving from GitHub or elsewhere are not exactly without fair warning that they might have to migrate again; we’ve not reached a utopia yet.
I don’t want to depend on a platform that rewrites its terms of service on a whim, without properly announcing that the change was even under consideration, and without giving its users a way to weigh in.
[…]
I wish it had linked to a discussion thread, or at the very least a poll, so that I could have voiced the concern I have
Then you should’ve joined Codeberg e.V. which gives you access to both a forum and a voting platform.
For context, that comes for the HN thread and blog post, not from anything I have written. Let’s attribute things to respective sources :)
Yeah sorry, I didn’t mean to address you personally and should’ve used they/them.
Ah yes, if you wanted a say you should’ve paid €50 to join something nobody ever told you about. How very open and community spirited.
something nobody ever told you about
Other than it being explained in big letters on the very front page of Codeberg?
Well that’s just how Codeberg works. It’s run by volunteers and organized as a registered association. This association strives to be very democratic about what happens to the platform, but you have to join it to gain insights and voting rights.
Of course you don’t have to and most users of Codeberg don’t - but you can and this makes Codeberg a lot more open and democratic than any other commercial platform.
I like it. We need more specialization of services and less centralization. If Codeberg is the “human-made FOSS forge” then that means something when you see a project on it. If that’s not your project, fine, there is plenty of competition (and Forgejo is open source just run it yourself).
Would be cool to see someone make a “vibehub” and then you know when you see a link to a project on there what you’re getting (depending on your opinion, good or bad)
While I fully agree and support Codeberg stance on vibecoded projects I’m not sure I follow their reasoning here. For instance they complain about webcrawlers scraping their site to train their LLM models but I don’t see why getting rid of the vibecoded repositories wouldn’t make them more palatable for scrapers. A site full of human made code is infinitely more useful to those companies than a slop infested honeypot.
if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer
I pretty much said this in the other thread. Unless you own the platform, or a significant investor in said platform, you are subject to the whims of the platform, good, bad, or indifferent. Some don’t like that I guess because they feel like they supported the platform, may have contributed to the platform, but at the end of the day, the platform dictates law for the platform.
Kind of like lemmy.selfhosted. There are rules. If you don’t bother yourself with reading the rules before posting, you get what you get.
The decisions did go through Codeberg’s own Assembly 2026, which is more process than most platforms bother with, and yet as an ordinary user I found out about it the way probably most people else did, through a dark blue banner at the top of the site on the day it was already settled.
I did not even get to know about this that way. Only now, a month later from some backyard forum.
Why would you, unless you are a member of Codeberg e.V. with voting rights? If you just use a gratis account on their platform, then you are just a guest they tollerate as long as you don’t become too smelly.
Why would you, unless you are a member of Codeberg e.V. with voting rights?
because as a user I may be affected by the rule. if you want people to follow your rules, not just to punish selectively based on them, you let everyone affacted know that you made a rule. because otherwise people won’t know the rule, and won’t follow it. and then you are an asshole if you complain that people didn’t follow rules they didn’t know were made.
Yes, that’s why they put up a big banner informing everyone after they decided on the ToS change.
I really get the feeling there are a bunch of people here commenting that have never visited Codeberg even once 🤦
Yes, that’s why they put up a big banner informing everyone after they decided on the ToS change.
the ToS change was a momth ago, they put up the banner like a week ago
That is not my understanding of the timeline. Yes, they asked their members to vote on it a month ago. But these votes take time, and once the vote was settled and the ToS adapted they immediatly put up the banner.
Honestly, I am not effected by the decisions in any way, the issue I take is with the extremely vague wording, the fact that these two changes were made rather rapidly and seemingly just because they don’t like that type of project.
What is the next project that harms their reputation? A torrenting application? An emulation application? Anything written in php?
We wouldn’t and don’t take kindly to corpos using this kind of stuff, why would it be different here?
It was a lenghty process with their members voting on both ToS changes. Just because you only hear from it now, doesn’t mean it was “made rather rapidly”.
And the ambiguity is necessary to prevent overburdening the moderators. This isn’t some legal code with a well funded state apparatus behind it.
This is such a pointless discussion. If you want to use AI a lot, just go to GitHub. If you don’t, go to Codeberg. What’s the problem?
despite the title its not only about AI.
OOTL Wasn’t there something about forgejos capabilities to federate? I had the impression, that it would go the fediverse route with many interacting instances. Then everyone can make their own rules. There are many reason to moderate repos. So why is this such a big thing (if forgejo federates as I remembered from the back of my head)?
Because Codeberg is its own charity type thing they have a cohort of users that vote on decisions made and you cannot even see how they came to that decision because that area is restricted to them. Presumably they might not federate at all.
Not federating at all would be a shame IMO. I’m really exited on this feature for git forges
Agree but their stance on LLM content is a big put off for me. I don’t share my scripts and things I write with AI but I like to keep them all together.
And it concerns me that Codeberg is the guiding hand for the forjejo project.
Response guy seems to think that “legitimate crypto” is a thing.
My SSH keys are legitimate crypto. Fake money for criminals is not legitimate.
Removed by mod
Yeah I stopped putting anything on codeberg and finished moving to sourcehut after they announced this. I’m stuck with Github due to work but policing whatever random repos I have and want source control is a bit of a dick move.
I have a local forjejo which replicates certain repos to Codeberg and others to Github. Now I have to adjust my integration.
