Codeberg Blog

I’m hosting my own https://tangled.org knot and spindle, and also hosting and building my own Frontend browser for https://forgejo.org looking forward to open sourcing it in the future for others to enjoy. For people who want a similar experience today, I’d recommend trying Codeberg (An official instance of Forgejo) though. However, keep in mind they voted in July to ban mostly AI generated repositories. You can read about that here: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html That's a fairly good starting place. Might seem innocuous, but don't forget that "far right" has no agreed upon boundary. You might as well replace it with "wrong think" at this point. Which, again, good for them. I could care less. I left a little over a month ago once I figured out what was going on. They are perfectly allowed their fiefdom on the internet, but I would never recommend the platform to anyone as a useful Git forge unless they happen to sit in that little thought bubble.

> it's for FOSS It is for FOSS, but they seem to be more restrictive now than even that, and I don't mean by LLMs. To quote their blog post: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html > So while the following use cases are discouraged (similar to private repositories), they are likely to be tolerated in practice: > > Side projects and experiments with little resource usage > > Specific tools and custom scripts that would be unlikely to find a community anyway, even if they were not LLM-generated I do find that extremely disappointing, that seemingly valid, human-written, compliant FOSS projects are merely "tolerated in practice". I am not storing my code there in any case.

https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html > Don't be fooled if right-wing forces promise to "promote open source" in their political agenda. This has nothing to do with the values of our movement! This is about national patriotism and protectionism, and they will happily accept splitting our community on their way. > If you ever considered supporting the fight against right-wing forces, for example by joining political movements and parties, organizing protests or getting involved in online communities with this goal - now might be the best time to move ahead.

We are missing the trees for the forest here. I think that Codeberg is not communicating their core values the best way and my understanding is: to be an open source, ethical, safe home for open source projects under Non-Profit Collaboration Community. If your repo were ever (even temporarily) disabled by a false or intentionally bullying DMCA take down request, you would know right away why every single word in the above sentence is important. And, hosted in Europe, under EU laws. This is a nice summary: https://blog.codeberg.org/codebergorg-launched.html Suggestions on how to make the messaging of Codebeberg clearer would be appreciated, Codeberg has an issue about this in their tracker: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/75 Edit: added link to Codeberg issue tracker

Additional note on Codeberg, which I think is great as a project, but I got curious on what infrastructure they are running on and how reliable this would be for larger corporate repos. Nov 22, 2025 https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.htm… Quotes from their website: Infrastructure status [...] We are running on 3 servers, one Gigabyte and 2 Dell servers (R730 and R740). Here's their current hardware: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/meta/src/branch/main/hard… [...] Although aged, the performance (and even energy efficiency) is often not much worse than with new hardware that we could afford. In the interest of saving embodied carbon emissions from hardware manufacturing, we believe that used hardware is the more sustainable path. [...] We are investigating how broken Apple laptops could be repurposed into CI runners. After all, automated CI usage doesn't depend on the same factors that human beings depend on when using a computer (functioning screen, speakers, keyboard, battery, etc.). If you own a broken M1/M2 device or know someone who does, and believe that it is not worth a conventional repair, we would be happy to receive your hardware donation and give it a try! [...] While it usually holds up nicely, we see sudden drop in performance every few days. It can usually be "fixed" with a simple restart of Forgejo to clear the backlog of queries. Gives both early-Google as well as hackerspace vibes, which can or can not…

Gitea Ltd's stance seems to be that it does "custom development" support contracts.[0] It may be a matter of perspective whether you consider this "open-core" or "contract work." See also their clarifications on Gitea the company[1]: > Gitea Ltd. will be open to building special versions for special clients and will contribute any features back to the main repository when possible This was in a followup to the original announcement.[2] Forgejo (i.e. Codeberg, a FOSS non-profit) maintains that the project should be led by the community, not a company[3]: > Sadly, Gitea Ltd broke that trust by a lack of transparency: its existence was kept a secret during months. After the initial announcement, Gitea Ltd published another blog post but it was still vague and there has been no other communication since. Who are the Gitea Ltd shareholders? Who, among the Gitea maintainers, are employees of Gitea Ltd? [0] https://about.gitea.com/pricing/ [1] https://blog.gitea.com/a-message-from-lunny-on-gitea-ltd.-and-the-gite… [2] https://blog.gitea.com/open-source-sustainment/ [3] https://blog.codeberg.org/codeberg-launches-forgejo.html

Also see from Codeberg: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html And a repo of tainted projects and untainted alternatives. https://codeberg.org/ethical-foss/open-slopware

Its about freedom, which codeberg are supposed to be proponents of. Turns out, they're no better than github :) See: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

CodeBerg comes with the advantage that Euro social democrat style moral superiority comes for free. Never mind it has worse performance under less load and its bet for dealing with the future is treating anything LLM related as hostile. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html You may agree with this. And if so, you have found your home. For those who just want to host, and not buy into this particular perspective, you should probably look elsewhere. I find a lot of people in the States promoting CodeBerg also have illusions about Europe, of the sort that are likely to be radically tested in the next decade, if not the next few election cycles alone.

It's not exaggerated. If you use AI at all for any code in the project it cannot be hosted on codeberg. They made that pretty clear in their blog post. You can read it yourself - https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

See also the codeberg blog post (https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html) which has more informal guidelines. That includes projects that are: 1. created by LLM agents -- any vibe-coded projects; 2. mainly written and maintained by LLMs -- this would cover the recent changes to the rsync project; 3. tied to the LLM ecosystem -- this covers pytorch, llama.cpp, cursor, SillyTavern, AI skills repositories, and a whole host of other projects.

The Codeberg blog post does mention those costs, but also a lot of other objections they have to LLMs so not simply away to avoid the loads. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html This policy does not help them to avoid the load of LLM crawling (except insofar it reduces the amount of code they host). They could limit other excessive loads more directly - e.g. no pushes or pull requests to be made by LLMs, rate limits per contributor, etc.

https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html In this corresponding blog post, one point made is that LLMs tend to LARP big-project infrastructure on small projects. They use the resources for something like GNOME but they aren't actually GNOME so they don't have any excuse for it.

> allowing LLMs and “AI” stuff with open arms while condemning PoW crypto is hilarious. They ban projects that are mostly AI, and I’d characterize them more as generally against AI: https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

Are these the people "controlling" it or just an adjacent channel (which excepted a few pinko CCC type people like the OP seems reasonable)? Anyway, if the earlier https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html didn't inform you concerning the kind of people running the show, I don't know what to tell you...

Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this. Yet, > I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't. https://blog.codeberg.org/one-year-into-the-war-your-help-is-still-nee… > I guess by ops logic I don't think so. Them being involved or not in the thing makes all the difference.

To be blunt, I think you may have misunderstood the values to begin with. A motion being passed by a majority is a lagging indicator to the values of the membership, so if they changed they will have changed a long time ago. The Codeberg blog has articles critical of AI published back in September 2024[0]: If they can use so much power to bring our systems down, imagine how much power they use by doing this to the entire Internet: We are concerned about the environmental and social impact of the current AI hype. Growth at all costs is something that we, as a non-profit, are not interested in. We believe in frugal computing and that the resources our planet provides are limited. It is no coincidence that we directly "compete" against a company that funnels billions into the AI hype. [0] https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-software-is-about-human…

They banned cypto projects two weeks ago. Today they banned vibecoded projects. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

> Cryptocurrency is bad, but LLMs are fine? No. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html

That is a strawman of a summary. https://blog.codeberg.org/protecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html is basically insulting all single-dev-zero-user open source projects by conflating them with AI. Codeberg isn't big enough yet to be this tone deaf.

I'm not OP but probably the licensing drama. Gitea is now open core if I remember correctly. Some details are available here[1]. I also used to run Gitea, but I don't any more. The open-source churn is getting tedious and difficult to keep up with. [1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/codeberg-launches-forgejo.html

Sounds like Codeberg would still take down the repo, but would be more supportive: https://blog.codeberg.org/on-the-youtube-dl-dmca-takedown.html (2020) Maybe there are more recent examples?

> If [..] we would receive a similar [DMCA] notice, then we most likely would have to disable the repository until the matter is resolved by court ruling if such is fought through by the project owners. This could include the code, issues, and documentation, which would immediately threaten/weaken the development community around that project. https://blog.codeberg.org/on-the-youtube-dl-dmca-takedown.html

I was slightly wrong. You can manually mirror things, but they have removed a feature that allowed one to automatically mirror repositories hosted elsewhere. It was originally intended as an ease of migration tool, but ended up consuming too many resources. From their FAQ: > Why can't I mirror repositories from other code-hosting websites? > Mirrors that pull content from other code hosting services were problematic for Codeberg. They ended up consuming a vast amount of resources (traffic, disk space) over time, as users that were experimenting with Codeberg would not delete those mirrors when leaving. > A detailed explanation can be found in this blog post.[1] [1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/mirror-repos-easily-created-consuming-resour…

I lost what little respect I had for Codeberg when they tried to spin a teenager exploiting an opportunity to spam/troll[1] that GitHub had solved several years prior[2] into "hate campaigns from far-right forces" that "endanger free/libre software projects" so they could toot their own horn at how good they were in the face of adversity[3] (and generally have a good moan about the right-wing) instead of admitting they should've seen this coming and prevented it happening in the first place. [1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/1786 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31627061 [3] https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html

I don’t have strong opinions about Zig or Codeberg, but I find the self-described status of the latter’s infrastructure concerning[1]: they’re seemingly running faulty hardware in production with limited redundancy, and are actively soliciting more hardware of unknown quality/reliability/provenance from their community. This is cool for a hobbyist project, but it doesn’t scream “stable platform for a post-GitHub world,” which is how I’ve seen Codeberg (aspirationally) described. [1]: https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-onwards-and-upwards.htm…

Reminds me of the Codeberg/SourceHut DDoS of January last year. CodeBerg even helped out SourceHut by hosting their status page. SourceHut ended up adopting Cloudflare. • https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-looking-into-the-new-ye… • https://sourcehut.org/blog/2024-01-19-outage-post-mortem/ • https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38959762

Please take a look at https://blog.codeberg.org/we-stay-strong-against-hate-and-hatred.html

Not sure about Gitea, but Forgejo is what is being used for Codeberg (and maintained by the same people, maybe?) whereas the voluntary association behind Codeberg (Codeberg e.V.) has at least 429 members (https://blog.codeberg.org/letter-from-codeberg-looking-into-the-new-ye… so I think it's pretty safe to say Forgejo will be maintained for the time being.