10 hours
cross-posted from: https://piefed.world/c/tech/p/1281550/codeberg-bans-cryptocurrency-projects
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22 minutesNot sure why there are so many people in this thread and on other Fediverse circles saying banning cryptocurrency-related projects is a good thing. The wording in this TOS is absolutely terrible and is vague enough that it will probably be abused. By the way, people especially in FOSS use cryptocurrency as an actual currency rather than just gambling and scamming. To all the people defending this: do you think being forced to use fiat currency, especially in opressive and increasingly oppresive governments, is a morally superior alternative to cryptocurrency? Come on guys.
“It can be used by criminals” so can darknets like Tor and I2P. So can all free and open source software. I genuinely believe that the people pushing these arguments either have no idea what cryptocurrencies are OR are completely brainwashed
People should have stopped using Codeberg simply because it’s a large centralised platform, how anyone is even still moving to it is completely beyond me
The rule is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”
The interpretation that all crypto projects are banned is false, if you read the complete thread. The important part here is “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg”. This was confirmed by a codeberg official.
https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19923979
and the 2 comments below.- Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zipEnglish8 hours
If that’s supposed to be the correct interpretation, why does the top of the site now state, “Cryptocurrency projects are no longer allowed. View change”?
I don’t know, ask them. In the referred thread in the end it says:
We would also like to refer to the comment by @defnull concerning the interpretation of this amendment.
Defnulls comment says:
Context is important. The rule is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects” and it’s a part of the “You must not share any content that’s expressing hate or encouraging violence towards a person or group for any reason.” rule.
If a project does not harm the reputation of Codeberg (e.g. by scamming people or doing other shady stuff) it does not fall under this specific rule. And if it did, it would be a TOS violation even before the change. Cryptocurrency (the scammy kind) was just added as an example here.
With a lot of creativity and a complete lack of trust in Codeberg you could read this backwards as “All remotely cryptocurrency related projects harm Codebergs reputation, so they must be banned” , but that’s not what this rule actually says.
Another common argument is that this rule could be abused to attack or harm ‘good’ projects. We all know how a bad laws (e.g. copyright) can be used as a weapon of suppression. For big platform, it’s way easier and also more safe to quickly act on complaints instead of investigating. Users are guilty by default and must prove they are not. Vague rules are very dangerous under those circumstances. The Codeberg TOS situation is fundamentally different though: > No one has any ‘right’ to get AI or crypto projects removed from Codeberg. Trolls cannot file false claims en masse and demand action to get someone else in trouble. If they do, then Codeberg mods can quickly dismiss those false claims, they do not have to disprove them. Banning a project is way more work than not banning it, so there will be no ‘purge’ and no mass-banning. No one has time for that. We just need to get rid of the worst and most obvious offenders, that’s all. Humans with brains will decide on a per-project basis.- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish6 hours
Humans with brains will decide on a per-project basis.
This is a good way to clear the “worst of the problems” - but a hopeless whack-a-mole task to get rid of problems altogether.
- Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zipEnglish7 hours
Looks like someone is already asking them for clarification in this thread here: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2929
Maybe the banner will be updated to more closely match what Defnulls said. Unless that banner changes it’s certainly not a stretch to say that “Cryptocurrency projects are no longer allowed.”
Yeah, Defnulls comment is pretty sensible and matches a platform like codeberg a lot more than a blanket ban for anything crypto related, even when it’s not intended for crap like a rug pull or smth. I am pretty sure they will clarify the rules asap, because the current way to phrase it doesn’t seem to match what they really wanted to do.
- nitroemdash@lemmy.wtfEnglish9 hours
Banning some technology just because it “harms the reputation” of a platform sounds a lot like Visa and PayPal attacks on Steam and Itch Io to ban NSFW games.
Crypto technology is diverse. Nano and NanUSD are completely carbon-neurtal as they have zero fees. Gridcoin helps scientific research.
Crypto may be tainted in the US where banking systems are okay, but for individuals in third-world sanctioned countries like Iran it is a life saver. For people in authoritarian countries, it is the only way to fund journalism and civil rights organisations that are illegal in their countries.
The original proposal contained a ban on all blockchain technology, and another code hosting service did that. It is a technology that is used by some governments to democratise digital elections. Fraud in 2022 Moscow council elections was uncovered because they relied on a blockchain technology.
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish8 hours
Crypto may be tainted in the US where banking systems are okay,
Are they? Even fucking Bitcoin has faster transfers than ACH lmao
For people in authoritarian countries, it is the only way to fund journalism and civil rights organisations that are illegal in their countries.
That’s literally the US pretty soon if not already tbh.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish7 hours
The United States federal government is the largest known state holder of bitcoin in the world, estimated to hold about 328,372 BTC, as of February 2026.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Strategic_Bitcoin_Reserve
- 8 hours
Yeah, only “cryptobros” could be upset about an open source hosting site deciding to officially ban “anything they think makes them look bad”, and using an entire field of software development as an example apparently based on the popular misconception that it’s a scam. This certainly isn’t a sign that any other projects could abruptly find themselves on the wrong side of someone’s opinion of whether they’re “bad” someday.
- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish6 hours
I’ve got a blockchain based project - hosted on Codeberg no less - that has nothing like an ICO or other get rich quick scheme attached, it’s about as sincere of an open transaction processing platform as you can get.
But a quick read will come away with “this is a Cryptocurrency project” - so… am I banned? Even worse, although I started it 8 years ago, I made a quick pass with Claude code recently to clean things up and implement some of the lagging parts… now I’m double-banned from Codeberg, right?
I’m glad they have principles, but one-word labels are really inadequate to separate “good” from “bad” - it’s almost always more complicated than that.
- Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish3 hours
So Codeberg had banned vibe codes projects and cryptocurrency projects, and you have a project that is neither vibe coded nor involving cryptocurrency?
- Statick@feddit.onlineEnglish3 hours
The AI code thing is geared towards vibe coded projects. Using AI to clean it doesn’t mean it’s vibe coded.
Codeberg e.V. members voted to ban projects that “mostly” consist of code written by generative AI tools.
You can argue, it’s hard to prove that etc, etc… But you need to remember that they have limited funds/storage and if vibe coders start using that storage with dead-end projects, that can be a problem.
- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish4 hours
I think they’re great for what they’re doing, but, truthfully, any “free use” system which has non-zero operating costs for bandwidth and storage is going to have potential problems that can’t be waived away with simple policy statements. 8 billion people on this planet, maybe only 80 million coders, maybe only 8 million active in creation of projects that would end up on Codeberg, but AI probably tripled that number to at least 24 million people, and those people (including myself) are making 3-300x larger projects with AI, not only because they can now, but because AI needs that extra documentation to successfully implement larger projects… just like teams of human programmers do, but AI makes it faster with less humans in the loop.
On the “people count” Github cites 180 million “individual users” but, how many of those are work/home/alt/other accounts of the same person?
- Statick@feddit.onlineEnglish3 hours
I’m not sure what you’re trying to say with arbitrary numbers pulled out of the air about the amount of “coders” and potential users on codeberg.
A lot of people go to codeberg to get away from big tech.
All their policy is saying is that they don’t want vibe coded projects on the platform. They would rather their storage and bandwidth go to real people, not dead-end vibe coded slop projects.
AI generated code is verbose, incredibly verbose, as you stated yourself… and a lot of the time verbose and bad.
This policy allows them to get rid of the worst offenders and point to the policy as their reason.
- MangoCats@feddit.itEnglish2 hours
what you’re trying to say with arbitrary numbers pulled out of the air about the amount of “coders” and potential users
No matter how wonderful and loved a project (aka business) is, it has expenses. A project like Codeberg’s expenses scale with the number of users and how they use the system.
This policy allows them to get rid of the worst offenders and point to the policy as their reason.
Agreed. However, at the scale they are operating at, I wouldn’t be surprised if they end up using a LLM assisted AI implementation to give them short lists of projects to review as potential “worst offenders”.
- Rioting Pacifist@lemmy.worldEnglish7 hours
Sure, but it is a scam, and I also don’t want child porn projects on my hosting platform.
- cadekat@pawb.socialEnglish9 hours
Ugh. Yes, cryptocurrencies are full of scams, and yes, memecoins as dumb as hell, but that doesn’t make the entire space worth banning. They don’t ban BitTorrent implementations because 99.9%[1] of the traffic is copyright infringement.
Ethereum, for example and chosen only because I’m most familiar with it, doesn’t burn electricity any more, is about empowering users, and has real use cases.
There are plenty of serious developers building useful technology in the space. Cryptocurrencies are censorship-resistant, and bad actors will inevitably use them, but that’s true of any open technology.
Ban projects that are themselves scams or fraudulent, but it’s unreasonable to reject an entire class of technology because those projects exist.
unsubstantiated hyperbole. ↩︎
- 9 hours
Padmé: So they’ll disallow Anubis (a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining; ironically, it’s used by Codeberg themselves), right?
Anakin: …
Padmé: …right?- 5 hours
And where in my comment did I say “Anubis is a cryptocurrency”?
Because, if you re-read my comment:
Anubis a “proof-of-work anti-bot” which performs similar instructions that of cryptomining
Emphasis on “similar instructions that of cryptomining”. I used the word “similar”:
From French similaire, from Medieval Latin similaris, extended from Latin similis (“like”). […] Having traits or characteristics in common; alike, allied, comparable.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/similar
As for why I’m comparing Anubis to cryptomining:
Iaso [author of Anubis] lists Hashcash as having inspired the [Anubis] project.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anubis/_(software)
Hashcash is a proof-of-work system used to limit email spam and denial-of-service attacks […] Like hashcash, cryptocurrencies use a hash function as their proof-of-work system
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash
Proof of work was later popularized by Bitcoin as a foundation for consensus in a permissionless decentralized network
But Codeberg just doesn’t want cryptocurrency scams, and Anubis isn’t a currency, it has no ability to pump and dump like cryptocurrencies can. Proof-of-work to weed out bots has little similarity in practical usage with proof-of-work to waste electricity for a digital number that is more often a scam than not.
- 51 minutes
Yes, but the phrasing used by Codeberg, “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”, is dangerously vague. One could argue Anubis is “cryptocurrency related” insofar it uses a cryptohashing technology also used by cryptocurrencies. Blame the “related” word in their phrase, a word of which is allowing for this kind of interpretation.
And while I didn’t watch the video you sent me (because I’ve been actively boycotting the monopolistic platform “Youtube”), I’m well aware of how crypto world is full of scam and I guess I fully agree in this specific point of yours (“cryptos are more often a scam than not”).
I am no crypto bro and I am an LLM sceptic but codeberg’s moves this past week make it unusable to my org, just as I was thinking of moving our entire codebase to it. I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future.
Are there any other FOSS alternatives Codeberg?
- lps2@lemmy.mlEnglish3 hours
Self-hosted Gitlab is the answer - I really don’t trust any cloud platform especially when they start to get opinionated like this
- 7 hours
I cannot guarantee that there will never be any LLM use in the future
Even if there’s no AI-generated code in a repo, there’s something else to this entire situation to which people seem to be completely oblivious. It’s how human code can be mislabeled/reported/accused of being “AI-generated”.
And, then, all of a sudden, the burden of proof will befall onto the accused, possibly without means of recourse. Any mislabeling would require the accused to prove the human authorship.
Oh, and any proof could be counter-argued to have been “AI-generated” as well… Because, as it turns out, It’s not as if people recorded themselves from a third-person perspective like they were a character in a damn game while they coded with their flesh-and-bones hands, and even if they did, anyone could argue “it’s AI-generated video, nobody records themselves in a third-person perspective”.
burden of proof will befall onto the accused
For þe LLM stuff, þis is my concern. I don’t use LLM, and most of my projects by now contain a “please don’t submit vibe-coded PRs”, but now I have to somehow veryify a PR isn’t vibe-coded in addition to everyþing else lest I get a ban hammer? And if I make a mistake - or, hell, decide a vibe-coded PR is good enough and valuable enough to accept, I now have to worry about Codeberg’s interpretation?
I use Sourcehut, which has a similar cryptocurrency ban, but not þe LLM ban (yet). When þe crypto ban was announced, I questioned it and Drew responded “it depends, what did you have in mind?” Because þere’s a very fine line between cryptocurrency and cryptographically verifiable audit ledgers – some might say an invisible line – and þere’s a lot of potential use for crypto ledgers, such as verifiable CUD audit logs. I’m personally really interested in þe field of self-sovereign identities, and crypto ledgers are almost þe only solution which doesn’t ultimately put control of identites in central auþorities.
I love Sourcehut, but þe crypto ban bugs me: I pay for my sr.ht account. If I used Codeberg, and I paid for it, I’d have a beef wiþ þe ban. As a free service? <shrug>
- 1 hour
now I have to somehow veryify a PR isn’t vibe-coded in addition to everyþing else lest I get a ban hammer?
Yeah, I’d say it’s one of the risks you’re facing from now on, from accepting PR to your repos (and you’d better stop accepting PRs altogether at this point). However, I’d also say it goes beyond merged code from PRs. Because it’s sometimes near-impossible to tell human-curated AI-generated code and human-made code apart, anything, at any point, can be accused of being AI-generated, and this rule is likely going to be retroactive (i.e. old but post-2021 repositories are as subject to this decision as the newer ones).
þis is my concern. I don’t use LLM, and most of my projects by now contain a “please don’t submit vibe-coded PRs”
Although I have a few old repos (mostly code-golfing, steganography and demoscenes/procedural esoteric art) I had backed-up from a former GitHub account, my worries are less about my code hosted in Codeberg (code of which is kind of abandoned at this point so I don’t truly care about my own repositories at all) and more about how it’s part of a bigger situation in which heavy-handed moderation mechanisms could be weaponized by people targeting works/artworks and/or creators/artists against which/whom the former people got a strife.
In this sense, even the Anti-AI people cheering this decision could, as ironically as it may sound, become the accused ones themselves, as anybody’s contents can be accused/reported/flagged of being AI-generated, just like a cop can plant fake criminal evidence inside someone’s backpack and cry “criminal”, then the burden of proof will befall over the owner of the backpack who’ll likely have no means of explaining themselves.
If I used Codeberg, and I paid for it, I’d have a beef wiþ þe ban. As a free service?
At least IMHO, while Codeberg is indeed a “free service” and not something that could be refunded, being a free service isn’t exactly a blank cheque: platforms such as Google, Facebook, TikTok and Xitter, even ChatGPT and the alike, for example, are all “free” services as well, could these platforms do anything as they please?
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish8 hours
Is your org entirely FOSS code, with literally nothing private/proprietary? Because if not, Codeberg was never going to be a good option for you, it only allows FOSS (and not even all licenses IIRC).
Codefloe is a Forgejo instance that, AFAIK, hasn’t decided to make any decisions on which technologies are allowed, and also allows private projects in addition to FOSS. Are they trustworthy? No idea, but if you want to be sure everything is private, you have to host your own shit anyway. Which most of us don’t have time for.
- Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zipEnglish8 hours
I’m wondering if there’s some grace period for projects to migrate, or if they just start locking projects down immediately after their community votes to ban something.
- 9 hours
The title of this post is incorrect. They are not banning cryptocurrency projects. See this message for why: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/pulls/1254#issuecomment-19923979
edit: man, I have no idea anymore.
- Sandbar_Trekker@piefed.zipEnglish8 hours
It’s a little hard to argue that when the top of the site now says, “Cryptocurrency projects are no longer allowed. View change”.
- 8 hours
Man, they need to hold another vote to get the verbiage of this cleared up.
- 8 hours
It’s still rather poorly worded, though. The ban is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects” which makes it seem like cryptocurrency is inherently scammy.
- 5 hours
It’s incredibly vague still, that’s the problem.
Like, I see, if I wanted to roll my own shitcoin, I can’t publish the source code of it on Codeberg.
But, say, a Blockchain lookup app - technically it’s a cryptocurrency related project, but at the end of the day it’s just an app that connects to a public API and lists data from it. Is it also banned?
Or, I make an open source smart clock, from an LED matrix and an ESP32. This smart clock can link to YouTube/Twitch/etc. for viewer count, to GitHub for project stars/forks, to currency exchanges, and one includes a crypto exchange rate tracker for displaying current mainstream coin valuations (say, the top 5 most used coins). Is this project, since it’s crypto related, banned?
Or let’s say I come up with something blockchain adjacent, that could be utilised for cryptocurrency use… and what if I just publish a new cryptographic approach that then gets used by a new cryptocoin that suddenly becomes famous?
Or if my project uses a cryptographic system that comes from a dependency that was broken out of a cryptocurrency project?
Where do we draw the line of “related”? What level of relationship is allowed with the world of cryptocurrency? What degree of separation is deemed appropriate?
- 5 hours
Even completely disregarding the cryptocurrency angle, “content that harms the reputation of Codeberg” is wide open to all sorts of future arbitrary interpretation. It basically means “if a lot of people dislike your project we nuke it.” Who knows when a lot of people are going to end up disliking your project? Who decides which people’s opinion matter to Codeberg’s reputation? And it’s something that can change at any time.
Maybe some open-source Fediverse server’s code is being hosted on Codeberg, and then one day some big news story breaks about how it was being used as the server for some big child porn distribution ring or something like that. The server’s name is showing up in news articles about this. Does it now “harm Codeberg’s reputation” for it to continue being hosted there? Boom, gone. Through no action or intent by the server’s authors, through nothing they could control or anticipate.
- 8 hours
Sounds like they’re willing to ban anything “unpopular.” Not a good sign for serious development.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish8 hours
That’s not correct, and you should know better than to claim this. 4 minutes before making this comment, you acknowledged it was about harmful products, not unpopular ones.
It’s still rather poorly worded, though. The ban is: “Content that harms the reputation of Codeberg, such as cryptocurrency related projects”
And AI is wildly popular. Competitor Microsoft has sunk billions into it.
- boonhet@sopuli.xyzEnglish8 hours
AI is wildly unpopular among certain circles (Fediverse being one and I suspect there’s a considerable amount of overlap between the types of people on Codeberg and Lemmy).
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish8 hours
It’s popular as far as billionaires and corporations like Microsoft and Facebook are concerned, which was my point.
- 7 hours
Pretty sure they’re not users of Codeberg, and likely weren’t the ones who voted for this TOS change.
Well, maybe Microsoft did, given it makes Github look more appealing by comparison.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish7 hours
Ah yes, Microsoft, the company people love because of their AI pushing
- 8 hours
That’s not correct, and you should know better than to claim this.
This is my first exposure to Codeberg’s terms of service, why would you think I know more than what I’m seeing here and in the linked pages? I haven’t used them before (and almost certainly won’t now).
The text you quoted from my earlier comment has nothing to do with any of this, either. I’m not sure why you think it means anything in this context.
AI is wildly popular.
Wow. I’d ask whether you’ve ever been in any threads on this community about LLMs, but of course I’ve come to recognize your particular username fairly well at this point.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish8 hours
why would you think I know more than what I’m seeing here and in the linked pages
Because 4 minutes earlier, you commented acknowledging their intent was to have a rule against harmful projects, not “unpopular” ones. I just explained this.
- 8 hours
You pruned off the last part of the sentence in what you quoted: “which makes it seem like cryptocurrency is inherently scammy.” Adds a bit of important context.
The interpretation that cryptocurrency projects are “harmful” is based on a popular position that misunderstands the nature of cryptocurrency and its full range of uses.
Your obsession with stalking me keeps leading you to pouncing on comments with an “aha! Got him!” That leads you to misinterpret them in the worst possible light. Which is quite ironic given the situation this thread is actually about.
- XLE@piefed.socialEnglish8 hours
Cryptocurrency has largely been adopted by the rich and powerful to keep speculating while avoiding regulations and taxes. Look no further than how Donald Trump and his family use it to enrich themselves.
Acting as if cryptocurrency is maligned because it’s “unpopular” is like acting that Donald Trump is a victim because he’s unpopular.
