Wow. I have never worked on any cryptocurrency projects and never intend to, but I will certainly be staying very far away from Codeberg because of this.

There are some levels of censorship that make sense for a code forge - “you can’t do crimes on our servers”, “you can’t host malware on our servers”, etc. But inflicting a subjective moral judgement on an entire category of software sends the message that this isn’t a safe place to host any of your repositories. If the moral landscape shifts in the future, how can you be sure your project won’t be next on the chopping block?

What a terrible precedent to set.

Why? Banning abuse is fine, and disliking Cryptocurrency projects at a moral level is fine, but running a coffee hosting service and putting your moral judgements on projects like this just seems childish and unserious.

I'm also apparently banned from reading the article, despite having no previous usage of Codeberg or any history with the project, so I can't even see their reasoning.

They are not the first code hosting service to do so. sourcehut banned cryptocurrency in 2022:

https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

https://man.sr.ht/terms.md#permissible-use

Mostly positive HN discussion when this happened: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33403780

I don't like crypto but this is poor reasoning, hastily implemented, and given very little time for discussion. There does not seem to be any concrete plan for notifying impacted projects or giving them a roadmap to migrate.

This is unprofessional and severely harms their credibility. It's not what was done but how they did it, and I don't doubt that subsequent policy changes can and will be implemented in the same manner unless it's addressed.

In the prior words[1] of Gusted, one of the board members that announced the ban:

> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...

As with the AI ban this was a community decision done by a majority vote. It seems that most people commenting or writing articles in the last few days don't have a Codeberg account or never visit the forum.

Let this be a reminder to never trust any service be it one ran by a billion dollar company, to one ran by volunteers. You will be eventually screwed over. Make backup plans, and self-host whatever you can so nothing can be taken from you. For Git forges, I personally recommend Gitea[1], or Forgejo[2] (a Gitea fork by Codeberg)

[1]: https://about.gitea.com/ [2]: https://forgejo.org/

Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.

Codeberg's paying members can off course vote on policies of their own non-profit. More power to them. You have the freedom to not use their service. There are ample alternatives.

Relatedly, Codeberg has also banned vibe-coded projects.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003465

The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg. The fact that they have ideological commitments that make them think banning cryptocurrency projects is a good idea is a separate good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.

Fortunately Codeberg is a relatively small player and Git forge hosting is fairly competitive and among the easiest types of online service to self-host, so the effect of this on most Git-forge-users is pretty minimal.

Well, definitely makes me inclined to never use Codeberg for source hosting if they can just get together and decide to ban an entire category of source repo.

It makes Codeberg seem like an unserious project.

Every open source project ends up politically opinionated because the people behind it is married to the idea of that project than what it delivers.

Commercial ones only care about what the project brings in, often money, but that often comes because of whatever value it provides the customer.

I'm not personally a fan of this move or the vibe coding rule. That being said, I genuinely wonder how many people complaining about the rule are personally affected. Seems weird to me to complain about a service setting its own rules when you don't engage with it or contribute to it.

This follows what SourceHut did in 2022 [1], but I think SourceHut did much better job to announce that (as of this writing).

[1] https://sourcehut.org/blog/2022-10-31-tos-update-cryptocurre...

> The text is now as-is because it was send out for votes. Small clarifications can be made afterwards by Presidium or Board.

Wording from a Big Politics. Is there a Codeberg Parlament? Just curious.

I'm not sure how this interacts with open source principles. I think they are free to do whatever they want with their own website and indeed with open source tooling, but as a host for open source it could conceivably conflict with those principles.

A much debated aspect of open source is that it may be used for any purpose. The JSON licence sparked much of this debate.

More recently there has been suggestions for an ethical source movement, which advocate that source may only be used for ethical uses. I presume they must mean Good old christian, pro family, anti-terrorism, traditional values etc. the usual ten commandments stuff. Or perhaps they had something else in mind, it's unclear, but what ever it is that's the stuff that's allowed and the other stuff isn't.

This is a good thing. Crypto is 95% scams, and the remaining 5% just WAY too risky for the normal-joe. Overall, crypto (bitcoin specially) is just a useless energy consuming nightmare.

The Onion needs to parody these recent decisions "Codeberg bans any code base hosted on Codeberg for violating ToS" lol

I get "Access denied" when trying to access. Can anyone archive?

Edit: https://web.archive.org/web/20260723015826/https://codeberg....

Unrelatedly, I can recommend Radicle, which hosts a growing network of crypto projects. https://radicle.dev/

Looks like another project that's gonna purity spiral into People's Front of Judea vs. the Judean People's Front weirdos sniping at each other.

This is a slippery slope, and I will stay away from Codeberg, because who knows what they'll ban next.

This is a battle that likely shouldn’t be handled as a war on crypto, simply change the wording of your TOS. Absolutely nuclear.

Seems like it's not for me, gotta move elsewhere.

Social signaling, surprise surprise!

Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.

Probably would have been better to do this before the moral outrage had moved on to AI. Now it just seems pointless.

Didn't they do this a while ago already?

Codeberg can ban whatever they want on their platform. The thing is nobody cares about codeberg, and this is probably just a publicity stunt.

Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...

Related:

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

Who?

> “ Codeberg is a non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects.”

Github still works, and the crypto ecosystem also has arweave and many others for static assets

Personally this makes me glad I moved to Tangled rather than Codeberg. I don't know how this will be enforced, but I'd be scared of similar things happening in the future to something I'm working on and all the strife that could come with the sudden removal.

For example, what would happen if they were to decide to ban Ruby On Rails projects because of DHH's fascist actions? I'm not sure I love the precedent this sets.

People always say they hate centralized markets, but whenever a market starts regulating to create its own distinct character, they push back.

Honestly, I think this measure actually gives Codeberg a competitive edge in terms of code quality.

I think we're now seeing a pattern where, under a 'free' large market, regulations are being used to create unique market identities. That's my take—it depends on what you regulate, which determines the market's character.

Personally, I've noticed that when Codeberg announced regulations around AI code, most of the comments cheered. But when the same people talk about cryptocurrency regulations, they get angry. It seems like people just want to regulate what they don't like, not what they do.

I won't use Codeberg myself, but I think this policy is reasonable. I've decided that what you regulate defines your market's identity.

Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.

This is an interesting development. I think for the forseeable future, more and more people (who run and/or own products or platforms like Codeberg) will continue to be more selective on what they accept on their platforms.

The software we write has been increasingly shown that they are not some unassailable paragon of neutrality and mere harmless artifacts. These things are written by people with intent. Naturally the other set of people who run these platforms would have objections on hosting them.

"Invevitability" gets thrown around these days. I guess this is the other kind of inevitability that comes from the environment we've created.

It's a shame that such a film of commercial and criminal slime surrounds big new technologies like crypto/AI that could otherwise be used for net good. But this is where we're at.

Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.

Cryptoberg or whatever.

Oh no, where ever shall the humble crypto/ai user post their code now. Codeberg was the last software forge that accepted crypto project hosting! Oh wait, sorry. Every other commonly used forge doesn't care.

HN loves to preach democracy until a platform governs itself in a way they disagree with.

If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.

Alternative git hosting truly is a cottage industry of terrible ideas

Seems fine to me. It was decided by a community vote; it's their site and their rules. The people complaining about those damn ideologicsts or whatever seem to be missing the point in that they are equally as ideological just in a different direction.

We're just returning back to the foundations of the internet where people setup their own community area and tell you what they will and will not tolerate.

I can't believe I want to make a comment that includes the phrase "virtue signaling" but here we are. (Also, based on my CI (with codeberg.org deps), maybe they should worry about uptime...)

Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.

edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?

> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground

This is far less controversial than their anti-AI stance which passed today.

I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.

But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.

I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.