Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency Projects
95 points
1 hour ago
| 37 comments
| codeberg.org
| HN
danpalmer
35 minutes ago
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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.

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mbac32768
6 minutes ago
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GitHub is the worst place to host your code. Except for all of the other places.
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hackermanai
3 minutes ago
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So it seems.
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JumpCrisscross
8 minutes ago
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> Why?

The impetus makes sense. Crypto is a hive of scams. It makes sense for honest people to want safeguards between their names and those folks.

The problem is this seems to have been implemented with zero attention to detail.

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hackinthebochs
29 minutes ago
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I'm also banned from the site for some reason despite never having been there before. Though I suspect my IP is on someone's naughty list for some reason seeing as I get far more captchas on the internet than I feel I should be getting.
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gh02t
18 minutes ago
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https://dnschecker.org/ip-blacklist-checker.php is pretty handy for checking if you're on any of the major blocklists.
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burnt-resistor
5 minutes ago
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Policing what can and can't be hosted is the opposite of freedom, it's tyranny.
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weakened_malloc
33 minutes ago
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They also want to ban 'AI slop' - I'd love to see how they draw the lines on that one.
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firloop
31 minutes ago
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You could probably use an LLM to detect some definition of ‘AI slop’.
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cute_boi
16 minutes ago
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And it’s easy to detect slop that sucks up infrastructure resources just by looking at commit rates. For example, Peter Steinberger made 271,281 commits. No wonder GitHub goes down regularly because of the increase in slop activity.
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tapoxi
30 minutes ago
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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.

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jjmarr
9 minutes ago
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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...

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fishgoesblub
36 minutes ago
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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/

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iamnothere
4 minutes ago
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Radicle provides self-hosting with decentralized mirrors for both added availability and DDoS resistance.

A Tor-hosted mirror provides extra protection against attacks on DNS or your domain name, and some additional DDoS protection.

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ivan888
14 minutes ago
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It’s probably not too important to choose a service that you think you can trust fully, because that trust might be broken at some point. But having an identifier that can be swapped to different backends, so people can find you again when the host inevitability changes, is a stronger strategy. I think the importance of owning domain names will increase, and using those as the canonical identifier of a project will give it more permanence. The procedures for seizure and censorship with domain names are better established and understood.
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sanskritical
33 minutes ago
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there's decentralized git on Nostr:

https://nostrapps.github.io/nostrgit/

Your public key is your sovereign ownership of your project, and with Nostr is no longer bound to any single entity.

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bergie
20 minutes ago
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Git over Reticulum is another option. You get git, issue tracking (work documents), release management

https://reticulum.network/manual/git.html

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datadrivenangel
20 minutes ago
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GIT IS DECENTRALIZED
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iamnothere
2 minutes ago
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Issue tracking and collaboration tools are not. (Although many small projects could get by with a todo.txt and a mailing list.)
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dbmikus
9 minutes ago
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But the identity part of git is not (unless you count pgp signing of each commit, which never took off at a large scale)

and the git tools don't automatically propagate repo changes by default across a network

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jmalicki
8 minutes ago
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But if you just hashed all the changes and put them in Merkle tree to verify, wouldn't that make it so much better?
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trentor
29 minutes ago
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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.
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Lerc
22 minutes ago
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I think their own community can make their own rules. My only thought in doing so the description of what they represent would then be subject to those rules.

They state "The mission of Codeberg e.V. is to build and maintain a free collaboration platform for creating, archiving, and preserving code and to document its development process."

It seems like they might now need to elaborate that they mean "free as in beer".

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comeonbro
20 minutes ago
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"the community" being some tiny subset of busybodies out of an OOMs-larger body of users that don't want to be bothered?

Real question, I don't know anything about Codeberg or its community.

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trentor
4 minutes ago
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Codeberg is a community steered project. If participating isn't something you're interested in, it's probably not the right fit for you. There are other Forgejo hosts (you could even be one yourself) where you can be the king of your own castle.
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sergiotapia
17 minutes ago
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This sounds like a very dumb decision to you and I and most, but see you don't use codeberg. I don't use codeberg.

So it's totally fine to poke fun, and totally fine for them to do whatever they want. We aren't part of that community!

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firloop
32 minutes ago
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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

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zx8080
2 minutes ago
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> 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.

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inigyou
21 minutes ago
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Codeberg is not a public dumping ground. It is a service offered by a non-profit with specific goals and missions.
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avaer
16 minutes ago
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That's fair.

They should probably put their political doctrines and ideologies on the home page so people can know if their projects fall into the category of undesirables before they make an account, since the list seems to be expanding.

Otherwise it's hard to tell what will be banned next.

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heiogalma
4 minutes ago
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Not really. I run a large community with a ban on AI and crypto, because those communities are usually incredibly spammy, toxic, and rude to other users (because they never cared about the community in the first place; only harvesting its users for their own gain.) "No AI/Crypto" isn't a law, its a note for grifters at the door that their code probably won't be appreciated. Whether or not this is in the "spirit of open source", as some other users suggest is an ineffective target to focus on. This is just a community trying and succeeding at its core users thriving, which tend to be anti-AI/crypto and more interesting in long term community building over harvesting group members for gain. Will this stop all AI and crypto projects? Absolutely not. But it makes it a less desirable target when your code can be removed. I don't really understand the handwringing from other members, especially considering 1. theyre not codeberg users 2. they skew positively on AI and crypto. Yall were never using codeberg, so why the concern trolling now?
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inigyou
13 minutes ago
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Does Google or Microsoft do that?
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avaer
12 minutes ago
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Google/Microsoft offer services in exchange for money. They are not tax exempt charities purporting to do beneficial work for society to earn that status. And they don't block your usage based on your perceived ideology.
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dbmikus
13 minutes ago
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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.

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minimaxir
30 minutes ago
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newsomix9xl
10 minutes ago
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Well there go my repos.
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JuniperMesos
31 minutes ago
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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.

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iamnothere
1 minute ago
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Exactly, I will no longer be recommending Codeberg moving forward for the same reason I don’t recommend GitHub. Political risk is a real concern for the projects I most care about.
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MallocVoidstar
26 minutes ago
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> The fact that Codeberg has the power to do this is a good reason not to host your code on Codeberg.

Everything other than full self-hosting has this exact power

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JuniperMesos
13 minutes ago
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Yes, and people should think about this much more than they do, when it comes to more popular services that also make ideological decisions about what user content to disallow.
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delfinom
17 minutes ago
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Yes, BUT there's a difference between holding the power and actually using it to enforce ideological positions.
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jdw64
1 minute ago
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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.

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pibaker
23 minutes ago
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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.
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Lerc
29 minutes ago
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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.

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jadar
21 minutes ago
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I mean that's how I personally would define ethical. But anytime someone makes a claim like that, you have to ask "by what standard." And it's usually just "me."
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letmevoteplease
30 minutes ago
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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.
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Heliodex
35 minutes ago
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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/

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lifthrasiir
27 minutes ago
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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...

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innocent_name
8 minutes ago
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Social signaling, surprise surprise!
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ninjahawk1
29 minutes ago
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This is a battle that likely shouldn’t be handled as a war on crypto, simply change the wording of your TOS. Absolutely nuclear.
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shikck200
16 minutes ago
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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.
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hackinthebochs
14 minutes ago
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While that's true, it's unrelated to hosting code. A reliable code hosting site should be agnostic to content. Once they start making editorial decisions about what projects to host, why should anyone trust them with their project?
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loeg
1 minute ago
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I just fundamentally disagree that hosting sites should be agnostic to content.

Should they host malware? Anything related to CSAM? Clearly it is reasonable for them to exercise some editorial control, and this is not a crazy use of that power.

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cute_boi
15 minutes ago
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The only good thing about crypto is we can send money easily to stupid countries without any hassle and crazy forex exchange. Other than that, i don't see any value in crypto.
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spaceman_2020
15 minutes ago
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You can say the same for AI btw

There’s not a whole lot of utility to filling the world with slop

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wewewedxfgdf
30 minutes ago
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Vision of the future for this platform, because all overreach makes companies more hungry for more overreach.
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andunie
34 minutes ago
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Didn't they do this a while ago already?
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lifthrasiir
31 minutes ago
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Apparently in early this month.
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ares623
25 minutes ago
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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.

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OuterVale
34 minutes ago
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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.

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fishgoesblub
30 minutes ago
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Makes me wonder if all non memory safe code will be on the chopping block in the next 5 years. Will they find it morally justifiable to "protect" people from evil unsafe languages?
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inigyou
17 minutes ago
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If the government can put the mayor of NYC on a list of communist Cuban terrorists (it did, yesterday) it can ban anyone from anything for any reason. Better be prepared.
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rvz
2 minutes ago
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If you are going to ban all cryptocurrency projects, you might as well ban all AI slop projects at this point.
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gnabgib
1 minute ago
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Err Codeberg bans vibe coded projects (150 points) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386
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ChrisArchitect
20 minutes ago
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Related:

Codeberg bans vibe coded projects

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49003386

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q8zd3
20 minutes ago
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Oh well, that is disappointing. I was enjoying it for my own side projects. I wonder what's next on their list...
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yieldcrv
27 minutes ago
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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

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newsomix9xl
9 minutes ago
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Codeberg is a fork of gitea iirc. All the crypto Bros are free to fork and finance a crypto friendly codeberg.

Cryptoberg or whatever.

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qiqitori
25 minutes ago
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Can we also ban Java projects? Don't really like that language.
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add-sub-mul-div
29 minutes ago
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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.
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inigyou
16 minutes ago
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It's the whole world. It's the current zeitgeist. Everything is for money extraction and everyone is a resource whose money is to be extracted. Anyone who tries to resist will quickly be moneyless, then homeless, then foodless, then dead. Resistance is futile.
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fzeroracer
23 minutes ago
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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.

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nixosbestos
12 minutes ago
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I can't believe I want to make a comment that includes the phrase "virtue signaling" but here we are. (Also, based on my CI (with codeberg.org deps), maybe they should worry about uptime...)

Also, idgaf what codeberg does, given that HN is virtually the only centralized platforms I use by choice (after all, where else would I watch people moan about decentralized platforms while being captive, and I do mean captive, audiences to centralized, censored platforms), but it's really a choice to merge something like this and then memory-hole the first Context link.

edit: wait, let me get this right, the justification Context was a non-public, forum, with this label?

> WARNING: This is currently not the official place for discussions but rather a testing playground

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heiogalma
11 minutes ago
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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.

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badatnames
33 minutes ago
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Alternative git hosting truly is a cottage industry of terrible ideas
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inigyou
15 minutes ago
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When it's your website you can decide what goes on it. Centralised services were so last decade.
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cmrdporcupine
7 minutes ago
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This is far less controversial than their anti-AI stance which passed today.

I have zero sympathies around crypto projects, generally. "Blockchain" feels to me like a venus fly trap that swallows distributed systems engineers and turns them into pseudo-libertarian apologists for money-laundering.

But I pulled my project off Codeberg today because of the anti-AI positioning. Not so much because of any specifics in their very vague wording, which they've left completely open to subjective interpretation. But because of the crazy toxic discourse on Mastodon and other places around it. People making analogies between people's LLM use and non-consensual sex, and accusing people seeking clarity on what "mostly AI" means of being like "creepy guys" etc. Just beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse and also being offensively trivializing of actual rape culture concerns without even realizing it.

I really thought I liked the codeberg community when I joined it. I'm a copyleft guy. My project is AGPL. I've been tilted pretty far over to the left my whole adult life. I liked not being on American infrastructure. It turns out I don't like these people though. Bye. I'd rather wade in slop than sanctimonious moralism.

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cyberax
29 minutes ago
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Good. Cryptocrap is unique among modern inventions in that NOTHING good came out of it. It's 100% negative.
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inigyou
15 minutes ago
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You can buy drugs with it
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cyberax
1 minute ago
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Exactly my point.
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