Do they really prohibit all use? My reading of their policy is that they mainly block vibe coding. It doesn't seem like LLM auto-complete or using it to review your code would run afoul of it.

Hmm I have my Hugo website there, closed repo and build, in part, with LLMs. Never realized while setting thing up that both are not allowed tbh. I just wanted to not choose GH.

Okay, what's the downside tho?

free as in freedom for humans. machines neither want nor need freedom

So they will never have these frequent downtime issues because they will never be bombarded by agents building millions of personal tools with no license applied. Clever.

Free as in freedom has had a rather specific meaning in software for the past 40+ years, which is "software that matches the Free Software definition." Codeberg runs on Forgejo, whose authors grant you the rights to run, study, modify, and distribute it - unlike GitHub, which is proprietary. (Indeed, there are many Forgejo instances besides Codeberg, it's not just a theoretical benefit.)

It is a ridiculous misinterpretation to assume it means "somebody else will host anything I upload, free of charge", which is of course not the case - not on GitHub either, by the way, their ToS just happens to be more friendly to slop.

(For understandable reasons, too; while M$ is making a killing from selling LLM access & Free Software as training data, the main "benefit" Codeberg sees is getting DDoSed by LLM scrapers 24/7 and vibecoders using up disproportionate amounts of resources.)

> All Git services are prone to massive surges in commit volume due to AI agents.

You are probably wrong on that.

> You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

https://codeberg.org/codeberg/org/src/branch/main/TermsOfUse...

Codeberg specifically has a policy against projects that are maintained heavily with AI tooling, so I don't think they would have that problem.

> I'd rather stay in Github and maybe use another service purely as backup.

Swap those two and you're on the right track. I think the best way to use GH is as a mirror for a self-hosted git instance, with or without web frontend. It gives you the reach of GH with the, dare I say it, reliability of self-hosted. It also gives you the chance to keep things off GH which you don't want to be there. Keep the self-hosted instance private for most things, use GH links for public access. When GH is down again you can always give people (temporary) access to your self-hosted instance if the need arrives.

Their terms of service forbid AI agents or even AI created code to be submitted there.

And if you put it in private we will never know, but pinky promise. They would never steal training data

Isn't that the case fro AGPL? You have the control over the source code and can change it, even if the current instance is not in your control.

What's missing?

Join us now and share the software;

You'll be free, hackers, you'll be free~~~

"'free as in freedom'" only narrows it down to not refer to the price. It doesn't actually state what you are free from or to.