u/Capital_Tangerine948

(edited with AI to trim it to half-size from the original draft I wrote. I think of y'all having to read through this lol)

A few months ago, Codeberg decided to stop allowing AI projects. In the new, unclear wording, projects that mostly consist of AI code will be removed. 'Mostly' is their word, not mine. It does a lot of lifting. Policy: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html. This is the final copy agreed upon by everyone who voted on it.

If you don't know Codeberg, I don't blame you. Barely anyone does, and they've now decided to become even more irrelevant—you'll see.

Codeberg is like GitHub: you use git to upload code, others download it. In its new policy, Codeberg tells "AI coders" to go back to GitHub. But GitHub is huge—projects like ffmpeg, which ships as a .dll with games you play, are hosted there. Also, Microsoft has owned GitHub since 2018. That matters, because Microsoft coined 'embrace, extend, extinguish' and deals in proprietary software. They could delete any critical repo and replace it with a paid service; they should never have been allowed to buy out github.

I support Codeberg's mission—I want alternatives to the corpo-owned internet. I'm just questioning this decision, rushed in 20 days.

Codeberg was never a serious competitor. I use it myself to avoid reinforcing GitHub—it's a personal choice. Codeberg sees itself that way too; it's in their mission statement. But here's the real scale of both: Codeberg's own Forgejo has barely 5k stars. GitHub's top projects have half a million. Openclaw, the viral AI agent, is the #6 most popular project on GitHub.

Now that Codeberg only wants pure, untainted projects, they've locked themselves into irrelevancy. It's not "might be more interesting than GitHub one day" anymore—it's impossible.

One thing people don't think about when it comes to AI code: security. AI finds vulnerabilities humans miss. That's just true. You have to run AI on code now, before some random with Anthropic credits finds the exploit for you... and doesn't disclose it.

But Codeberg cited "bogus AI issues" as a reason for the ban. So we're supposed to push and use buggy, vulnerable code because it's "purer"? Sorry, that won't fly for me. I'd prefer my apps to not have vulnerabilities anyone can exploit.

They also imply you can't act on AI-generated bug reports at all. If someone finds a real problem using AI, you're supposed to ignore it, apparently. Because in their unclear wording, and with the climate reigning over Codeberg right now, accepting it might very well get you and your project in hot waters.

The wording is unclear. I don't argue semantics, but Codeberg admits they can't really find these projects—yet they "know" it's a huge problem? They have proposed no detection tool, no automatic ban, no reporting mechanism. A 'moderator' from codeberg apparently pulls the trigger on their own.

And 'unmaintained' is undefined. If I upload a working repo and wait for user reports—but nobody uses Codeberg, so nobody makes reports—am I unmaintained? Do I need pointless commits to prove I'm alive? They don't say, but it's heavily implied. Remember: the most-starred repo on Codeberg has barely 5k stars. You don't use Codeberg to get users or a community, you use it because it's not Microslop.

The vote optics are bad too. Anyone who donates can become a member and vote. People openly said they'd drop €10 to push this vote through. It was announced before a decision was made and that's really, really bad optics. It should have stayed an internal matter until a decision was reached. I also manage and work on public online communities, it's what I would have done. Instead, they were communicating that they let people buy their way into a vote. That's... not very democratic, for a service that wants to claim it's all about FOSS (free and open source software).

Am I here to character assassinate Codeberg? No. I've managed online spaces too. I'm just saying this reinforces that you want specific developers and no one else, closing yourself off. It's at odds with your mission.

They also invite pushback with lines like:

> Using LLMs to work with your code gives you a kick of adrenaline. You can develop at a rapid pace, build things as if you had a large team. Only that you have none. In fact, you are (often) alone, working with a statistical machine that turns energy into code.

I'm not saying they can't say it—I just don't find it relevant. This is "I really want to make a statement" from them, and kind of tone-deaf, since FOSS projects often have a single core maintainer behind them (who often burns out from the popularity).

One of their reasons for this decisions was resource usage: they provide free hosting and thus want "quality". I get that—they give out free server resources unconditionally. But hand-coded doesn't equal quality. And this is why rate-limits exist: give new accounts 10MB, limit repos to 5MB, expand over time, charge for more. That's more sensible than blocking AI, because Codeberg would at least get something out of it.

They lament AI companies crawling "nonsensical" pages like git history—that's actually how LLMs are trained nowadays, they learn how code evolves over time and why. Instead of banning, they could make deals with companies for access, like Reddit and Stack Overflow did. They're gonna crawl you anyway, least you can do is charge them for it.

It just seems like virtue-signaling. They say LLMs are a danger to FOSS, but their solution is to take themselves out of the equation—out of the discussion, out of growth, out of ever being a relevant alternative to GitHub. All so they can stay pure while AI keeps doing its thing with or without them.

It's certainly a choice, but it's not one that's in the best interest of FOSS.