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 5 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

▲ kstrauser 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm with you on this. I started moving projects to Codeberg when my understanding of the rules was that it was friendly to FOSS projects. Now it's explicitly unfriendly to a set of FOSS projects (albeit of a kind that I didn't participate in anyway) and users who use a particular kind of tool while working on their otherwise OK FOSS projects.

Now you can have a perfectly legal GPL-licensed project that's not welcome because of the category it finds into or because of its devs' tooling. It's their site and their rules, sure, fine, but it does mean I'm not going to host my policy-compliant projects there. Are they going to get banned next month? Who knows.

▲ lowsong 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

To be blunt, I think you may have misunderstood the values to begin with. A motion being passed by a majority is a lagging indicator to the values of the membership, so if they changed they will have changed a long time ago.

The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]:

    If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype.
    Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype.

I don't even use Codeberg, and I've understood it was at best wary of AI for years. This shouldn't have come as a shock to you.

[0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-a...

▲ aliasxneo 4 hours ago | parent [-]

This is basically the argument I've seen over and over again from the Codeberg community. Boo hoo, you misunderstood the writing on the wall and now you're stuck doing a bunch of work. Goodbye.

I mean, more power to you (the community) in setting up your fiefdom, but by God do I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue. I don't understand why it's so hard to show a little understanding and compassion.

	▲	lowsong 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		`I suspect there's going to be some good people who leave, not wanting to participate in that sort of dialogue` What "sort of dialogue" are you referring to?