You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.
Why is that? Is it because you believe there would be a new policy that would exclude your workflow? What would such a policy be? Do you really, reasonably believe it would be implemented "tomorrow"? Do you think adapting to such a policy would be unreasonable?
Or is it because you don't trust the judgement of the people enforcing these new rules?
If not one of the two, what is the reason?
The point I'm trying to make here is that this just sounds like a slippery slope argument. If you don't have a concrete reason to believe you won't be welcome "tomorrow" then my mind has not been changed.
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term.
Correct. I was previously engaging with this community and had moved some repos over from GitHub. One of those repos deals with cryptography that has an intersection with "crypto" projects. Due to vagueness of the language ratified, it's unclear whether the repo now violates the ToS. This completely caught me off guard, and now my trust in the judgement of the Codeberg community has been weakened.
This feels like a reasonable reaction to me.
Honestly, for me, both.
While I can't find something specific about it in the new ToS, the new blog post notes that "side projects and experiments", and "specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway" are "discouraged", but are "tolerated in practice" if they only use minimal resources. This is stated as being regardless of LLM use. So some of my repositories are apparently already borderline in the community's opinion (it's not clear how they judge use of resources, but I only use self-hosted runners).
But there also seems to be an increasing sense that many active members see Codeberg as a space for a particular type of FOSS, within a particular, normative view of what development and communities should look like. This ties into the "side projects and experiments" comment, and to the general tone of the AI blog post on what they want Codeberg to be and not be. The point about "projects with a single developer and virtually no users", about "large ghost projects", and so on, are within the context of AI, but are derided in a wider sense.
Some of my repositories look like single developer experiments with no users or community, but aren't. I'm ultimately a scientist, not a typical developer; users typically communicate by email and at conferences, and cite my software and associated papers in their papers rather than starring repositories on forges.
And yes, much of the discussion around these questions often falls into the argument that projects that are good will be fine, because they'll be accepted despite the rules, and that any concern about specifics is unwarranted. But I can't know that I won't be targeted by Codeberg having an increasingly normative view of what 'proper' community development looks like.
(Yes, I realize I'm free to use something else. I'll likely end up moving my repositories off Codeberg and onto some combination of my own Forgejo instance and Github. The lack of federation in Forgejo heavily penalizes not being on a major instance, however. Meanwhile, as much as I encourage using DOIs for citations rather than URLs, people often do the latter, so staying on an instance that might decide to ban my projects can create lasting problems: one of my whole reasons for starting to migrate to Codeberg was because it seemed organizationally stable.)
> You are effectively saying you do not trust the judgement of the community to accept you long term. Why is that?
I think the blog post explained exactly that. To quote:
> The actual wording makes this more difficult. The terms prohibit projects that mostly consist of code written by generative AI tools. In an actively developed codebase, what does “mostly” mean, and who can still tell? I could not reliably assign authorship percentages to many of my own recent projects. The line is open to interpretation precisely where it needs to be enforceable.
Is it not obvious? They've just done it. They've excluded people based on new rules, and not everybody was expecting those new rules.
Having done it once, they can clearly do it again. Will it be justified? Who knows? Will it exclude you? Maybe.
I think the burden of proof is on you to argue that Codeberg will stop at exactly two policies, given they haven’t said they will do that, but they have already banned things they don’t like. A slippery slope argument isn't a fallacy when you've already slipped down the slope twice.