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.” References [1] [2] [3]