From what I understand from their blogpost, it was mostly about conserving their own resources, because a lot of the vibecoded projects they got were uploading insane amounts of binary releases and wasting resources on CI/CD while having no users or other collaborators.

They wanna reserve more server space for projects, that actually productively use it, like bigger FOSS projects with actual users and contributors.

That is perfectly understandable for me, even without taking my huge distaste for AI into consideration. Anyone that thinks, that this small, community funded project is obligated to host their huge slop repos semms pretty entitled to me.

I'll offer a comparison not yet mentioned in the context of hosting software, but which should sound familiar in the social media context: moderation is hard at scale.

By every metric of scale, Codeberg is a competitor to the behemoth that is GitHub. And that means they have to contend with tough choices, such as who and what to host on their servers, no different than BlueSky, Facebook, and the individual instances of the Fediverse. And to be clear, Codeberg has always been limited to FOSS projects anyway, so nobody can genuinely argue that limits weren't in the cards.

The distinction is that less alike Meta, and more alike with the Fediverse, Codeberg takes no hostages: people with obvious AI repos (or even marginal repos, given the possible ambiguity) are free to take their code and leave. Yes, they have to rebuild their CI pipelines, but that's always required for any platform, including self hosting.

The fact is that Codeberg is a centralized entity that needs to (try to) make consistent policy. In this case, they have a concern about copyright and nothing anyone says can magically dematerialize that risk. If their new policy is not agreeable, then decentralized self hosting is probably the only way forward. But that was always an option with ForgeJo and federation.

And indeed, folks moving from GitHub or elsewhere are not exactly without fair warning that they might have to migrate again; we've not reached a utopia yet.

Frankly, I don't see where the whole big deal of this story is.

People who don't like codeberg can just go somewhere else (even back to github) and/or found/support an alternative that better suits their needs.

It's not like the world needs to have one git hosting service to rule them all, it's not like there must be free ones (entitled much?), and it's not like whatever service happens to be the new "cool" one must be neutral as to what they host.

BTW, although to my knowledge their policy is not enforced super-strictly, codeberg has never been neutral in this regard — see 1 and 2

Lots of people who have never used Codeberg and don't understand the difference between Codeberg and Forgejo are very angry about this.

I like it. We need more specialization of services and less centralization. If Codeberg is the "human-made FOSS forge" then that means something when you see a project on it. If that's not your project, fine, there is plenty of competition (and Forgejo is open source just run it yourself).

Would be cool to see someone make a "vibehub" and then you know when you see a link to a project on there what you're getting (depending on your opinion, good or bad)

I'll just note that they can make whatever decision they want, its their platform, and considering its just forgejo underneath - you can always take it and host your own.

Also, I think it coincidentally lines up quite nicely with what we have here for posting an AI project now. Anything at that Generated stage is going to count as "mostly".

I find it disappointing that people are upset with codeberg over this.

if you don’t self host it, the cloud is just someone else computer

I pretty much said this in the other thread. Unless you own the platform, or a significant investor in said platform, you are subject to the whims of the platform, good, bad, or indifferent. Some don't like that I guess because they feel like they supported the platform, may have contributed to the platform, but at the end of the day, the platform dictates law for the platform.

Kind of like lemmy.selfhosted. There are rules. If you don't bother yourself with reading the rules before posting, you get what you get.

Honesty, I respect Codeberg for making a decision. No matter what they choose there would be pushback

I think the "regret" post misses an entire point, that Codeberg doesn't want to be the place where AI stuff is hosted. Maybe it wasn't clear in their communications but it always seemed to me the copyright and resource stuff was more of a justification of something they wanted to do anyways.

Also everyone suggesting AI should just be treated as a tool comfortably ignores the externalized costs. Maybe there's some "yeah it sucks but we can't to anything and it so we just use it" and that's it. I'm so tired of lengthy AI-is-just-a-tool justifications that are omitting the central point.

The article seems correct with the "Codeberg's reputation" clause though. That one smells bad, not sure why they felt the need to add it.

I fail to see why people are getting worked up. While yes the tos says the ambiguous "mostly" the rest of the paragraph gives you a clear indication why. Copyright. Which I the same reason many other platforms don't level allow vibe code into their codebases.

CB does not want to host code a large number of repos that in the future could be classified as stolen code, and now as the code host will have to do the work of deleting it all when they get sued for hosting it. And you know right holders are just waiting to do that.