Document: WR-026                                                 P. Webb
                                                              2026.07.23

           On Codeberg banning crypto and LLM-assisted repos

Body

   The great thing about the internet is that other people have the same
   thoughts as you, saving you from typing your own novel. Case in
   point[1]:


   It’s frankly a bit snotty of Codeberg to make this argument at
   all, considering that the platform effectively lives inside the
   Forgejo bubble, and Forgejo mutinied inherited its
   community of active contributors from Gitea, who had spent the
   better part of six years building that community before Forgejo
   even existed. A project that acquired its own community by
   hard-forking someone else’s, then turned around to lecture solo
   developers about not having one, is a difficult position to argue
   from with a straight face.
   
   In addition, Codeberg conflates “having a community” with
   “being legitimate software worth hosting”, when the bar for a
   personal project has always been a working build, ideally a
   license, and maybe a README, and not a channel full of
   contributors. A good deal of what makes the small, single-author
   tool ecosystem worth having is precisely that it doesn’t need a
   community to justify its existence, and a forge whose entire
   selling point is hosting the code of individuals is an odd place to
   argue the opposite.



   and[2]:


   I’m sure you have some morally high reasons to stand against
   cryptocurrency, but the "illicit trade" and "evasion of sanctions"
   cited by sourcehut (since you seem to base your decision on it) are
   also what allows regular people, including LGBTQ+ people, living in
   sanctioned countries (which also, what a surprise, turn out to be
   unsafe for LGBTQ+ folk a lot of the time), to buy goods and
   send/receive money from abroad without being prosecuted by their
   governments (hi foreign agent laws! hi "extremism" and
   "terrorism" laws!).
   
   I’m sorry, anti-war transgender person stuck in Russia, but from
   our moral stance, you shouldn’t be able to purchase HRT from a lab
   using your XMR wallet. nor should your friend be able to pay for
   their foreign VPN VDS that they use to bypass the internet
   restrictions in USDT. the projects you used for this were hosted on
   Codeberg and not some other platform? well, too bad, they’ll have
   to go someplace else that minds your existence or is welcoming to
   cryptocurrency as a whole, and you will wait. you and the tools you
   use will move to a greedy corporate hosting that is likely to
   impose its own restrictions on you in the future, or, even better,
   move to a less reliable self-hosted option, one per each tool to
   make it less maintainable and less accessible.
   
   by taking this stance, at least from my perspective, you’re just
   projecting your morally high delusion of dirty illicit 3rd world
   crypto scammers that are damaging the moral purity of Codeberg
   by… hosting code for their projects here?! which, mind you,
   almost all the time will just contain tools, tools to do good or
   bad. do you want to ban BitTorrent-related projects from Codeberg
   next because they are "mostly used to get illegal access to
   unlicensed digital goods and services (piracy)" and also take up
   world bandwidth and compute? how about banning YouTube downloaders
   after those? hey, let’s make it clear that Codeberg will not stand
   a single repo on its platform that involves encrypted messaging:
   you know only criminals use Matrix, right?



   finally, from your’s truly[3]:


   They really quoted the FBI Director in their reasoning? Unserious
   people. Anything law enforcement can’t peek into is “designed
   for criminals.”