alt Hacker NewsCodeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
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That's it. I'm leaving Codeberg. Feels like if European Union was turned into a code forge.
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
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.
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.
Time to move off of Codeberg. They provide a service, that's it. I don't want drama from my service providers, and censorship incurs drama. I think some censorship is needed (hate speech, CP), but I do not want projects deleted because someone running the service doesn't like how I make them, or what they are for. They have the right to do that, but I also have the right to vote with my feet and go elsewhere, and I'm doing that. LLMs assisting coding has it's place, crypto has its place, both have been overhyped and so we're now getting a rubberband effect as people express hatred of these things based on the hype - not on their legitimate purposes.
Prohibiting fraud or infrastructure abuse is one thing, but declaring entire categories of lawful software harmful to Codeberg’s reputation is another. They've ironically tanked Codeberg's reputation far more from these policy changes than any projects in that category could have possibly. After these changes, it is difficult for any business, or any project seeking stable infrastructure, to trust that its codebase won’t become unacceptable after the next member vote.
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.
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...
I didn't know of codeberg before and this is likely the last time I'll see it.
This seems more like a marketing stunt than anything else. They previously "banned vibecoded projects".
Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.
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/
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.
Relatedly, Codeberg has also banned vibe-coded projects.
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.
If you work for a tech company, I can practically guarantee that it bans a lot of lawful behaviors on its platforms. Paypal bans or restricts online dating, cigarettes, and firearm accessories. Youtube demonetizes swearing. Facebook prohibits the sale of bodily fluids (I don't want to know what triggered that policy) and "used cosmetics".
If you're not interested in stuff like that when your company is doing it, but are up in arms about some other platform deciding that they don't like crypto, I think you should look in the mirror. Their reasoning is probably the same: they don't like it and don't want to put up with the task of sensibly policing the category.
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...
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.
My code repository should host my code, not go on dubious moral crusades. Glad I stayed on Github.
Their ban on nebulously defined vibecoded projects is even more ridiculous.
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.
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.
https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-ha...
It's not like they've been hiding their activism.
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.
It's a good decision to ban cryptocurrency projects. Such a project may be mostly fine, but considering overall cryptocurrency shady reputation it's better to keep it away.
The same is for LLM-slop projects. They have little to no value for the society and may be dangerous.
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.
> 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.
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.
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/
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.
The Onion needs to parody these recent decisions "Codeberg bans any code base hosted on Codeberg for violating ToS" lol
Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.
Seems like it's not for me, gotta move elsewhere.
Social signaling, surprise surprise!
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.
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.
Probably would have been better to do this before the moral outrage had moved on to AI. Now it just seems pointless.
Codeberg can ban whatever they want on their platform. The thing is nobody cares about codeberg, and this is probably just a publicity stunt.
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
It seems like the “Your organization needs to pass my personal moral purity test before I accept free hosting from it” posters aren’t really grasping how that is the opposite of a threat
It is like “I’m not taking anything from that food bank since they clarified that they won’t be accepting or doling out rat meat” like ok buddy, you do you
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.
Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.
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.
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.
Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...
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.
Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.
Cryptoberg or whatever.
If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.
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.