マリウス . I Regret Migrating to Codeberg
A brief comment on Codeberg’s new terms, and why a free-software host<br>deciding which projects are welcome worries me more than the bans themselves.
My primary reason for leaving GitHub was not about a single feature or a<br>single outage, but about the “enshittification” of the platform under<br>Microsoft’s ownership. The web interface got rewritten into a sluggish pile of<br>JavaScript that either broke things which used to just work, or<br>made them so horribly slow that using them became a PITA. Beyond the technical<br>decay GitHub had turned into de facto “public infrastructure” in much the<br>same way that WhatsApp has, hosting the source code of a very<br>large share of the world’s software and, through that, giving Microsoft a<br>degree of leverage and surveillance over everyone’s projects, and by extension<br>everyone’s digital lives, that no single company should hold. On top of that,<br>stories about legitimate developers losing their accounts due to arbitrary bans<br>by Microsoft only reinforced the feeling that it would be a good idea to at<br>least have a backup somewhere else.<br>Codeberg looked like a viable alternative. It offered free and open-source<br>projects a reputable home and, more importantly, an equally free one, run by a<br>non-profit association rather than a subsidiary of the largest software vendor<br>on the planet. Unfortunately, the latest update to its terms of service seems to<br>mark a first step in changing one part I moved there for, namely the “freedom”<br>part.<br>Human stupidity<br>Every project I’ve published so far was built with 100% human stupidity rather<br>than “artificial intelligence”, or, more accurately, LLMs. I don’t hold<br>particularly strong feelings about Codeberg banning projects that are<br>predominantly LLM-driven, at least not feelings as strong as the ones I hold<br>about the simultaneous ban of legitimate cryptocurrency projects, which reads as<br>though it got lumped in for no reason other than that most people still remember<br>the villain-du-jour that crypto was in the years before LLMs took that<br>title. The two clauses landed within days of each other, the LLM prohibition<br>on the 29th of June and the cryptocurrency prohibition on the 2nd of July, both<br>as Assembly 2026 proposals, and the terms now file the latter under,<br>of all things, “content that harms the reputation of Codeberg”, which sounds<br>like legalese for “we don’t have a solid reason or an actual number of bad<br>precedents to categorically ban it”.<br>The announcement blog post, however, reads very poorly, and the<br>section titled “The development team of none” is the worst of it. It states:<br>Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can<br>develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that<br>you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical<br>machine that turns energy into code.
And, a little further down, it says:<br>It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don’t realize that they don’t actually have a<br>community around them.
This is out of touch with how most free software gets made. The majority of<br>FOSS developers are one-man-shows, and the only cOmMuNiTy they have around<br>them are the users requesting features or reporting bugs while most of the time<br>not contributing in any form whatsoever. I’ve been publishing silly little<br>tools for decades, predating this website and even GitHub itself<br>(remember when SourceForge was the hot sh.t?), and not one of them has ever<br>had an actual “community” around it, at least not in the romanticized sense<br>that Codeberg paints in that post. I’m a lone wolf who codes everything by<br>hand and spends an absurd amount of time doing exactly that, and the notion that<br>an LLM is the thing separating a real project with a real community from a<br>fake one does not hold up once you look at how the average useful little tool on<br>any forge comes to exist in the first place.<br>It’s frankly a bit snotty of Codeberg to make this argument at all,<br>considering that the platform effectively lives inside the Forgejo bubble, and<br>Forgejo mutinied inherited its community of active contributors from<br>Gitea, who had spent the better part of six years building that community<br>before Forgejo even existed. A project that acquired its own community by<br>hard-forking someone else’s, then turned around to lecture solo developers about<br>not having one, is a difficult position to argue from with a straight face.<br>In addition, Codeberg conflates “having a community” with “being legitimate<br>software worth hosting”, when the bar for a personal project has always been a<br>working build, ideally a license, and maybe a README, and not a channel full of<br>contributors. A good deal of what makes the small, single-author tool ecosystem<br>worth having is precisely that it doesn’t need...