Welp. Looks like I'm never going back there.

I mean, that's your right, but also they'll get new users too. So much of the internet is drowning in slop that any place that's still brimming with original content will likely see its stock go up, and will tend to attract people who still do original work, creating a virtuous cycle

How do you define "slop" ?

Yeah I don't know. It's impossible to draw a clear line, but the overall effect is not hard to identify. If your work supports a community and creates value, you can reasonably expect the community's support. If your work leeches from a community, you can reasonably expect the community to turn on you.

To me slop is identifiable by its effect: it is the type of work which leeches value

To me, this all sounds like the kind of fuzzy reasoning and nondescript language that turns communities into popularity contests and backstabbing competitions.

If Codeberg wants to put a flag up to draw in every programmer with a personality disorder, well that may be their right, but it’s not a good idea.

>To me, this all sounds like the kind of fuzzy reasoning and nondescript language that turns communities into popularity contests and backstabbing competitions.

Welcome to society. There is no such thing as a meritocracy.

Fortunately, some of us have this cool thing called intelligence, which allows us to build unique spaces that have different rules from the norm.

I love that way of thinking, but for me it's not intelligence but rather philosophy, community, and care (three things LLMs can mimic, but ultimately lack to an even greater degree than they lack intelligence)

Indeed it's almost like open source projects can use their collective intelligence and decide for themselves what's acceptable and what's not acceptable when it comes to free git hosting, irrespective of "the norm".

Tough. The world is fuzzy and nondescript. Platform says no porn, you ask if one bare nipple is porn. Platform says English only, you ask if it's okay to use loanwords. These would be good questions if you were programming a computer, but dumb questions to ask about a judge.

The real world (as in society) has labyrinthine processes and procedures, with multiple checks and balances, designed to ensure that justice is at least partially served. Codeberg appears to lack this.

And nations with civil law systems would disagree with your premise. Laws in these systems are expected to be clearly written without excessive room for interpretation. There are obviously still grey areas, but the systems aren’t flexible and open to interpretation like common law systems.

But in any case, we’re talking about a freaking git project host here, not a nation. They can set the rules however they want. But from a developer (user) perspective, they should favor rules that treat projects fairly and with a more liberal moderation policy.

Has any enforcement action occurred based on new ToS yet?

Not to my knowledge, but without a structured framework for those decisions, I have little confidence that enforcement will remain fair and even-handed moving forward. I also suspect that the ambiguity of the “reputation” clause will be abused in the future.

Codeberg doesn't allow porn. Are you concerned about it because you don't know if half a nipple is okay? Or is that rule fine with you, actually?

I would like a clear process by which these things are judged in the event of disagreement, yes.

And it bothers you they they didn't specify how much of a nipple is porn?

> the overall effect is not hard to identify

Yes, the effect is it will become a toxic community where your project can be summarily judged and instantly dismissed as slop because there's an AGENTS.md file in the repository or LLM attribution in the commit messages.

AI slop projects, or vibecoded projects, or projects made with heavy llm assistance, or whatever you want to call them are already divisive and the discussions about whether they aught be allowed are already causing strife in many communities.

Right or wrong many users are utterly uninterested in said content and wish that their existing communities could continue as they did prior to the onslaught. Naturally, some communities will decide to attempt to moderate in such a way that supports those users desires. As with most necessary moderation of online communities there will be gray areas and judgement calls and drama and abuse. There really isn’t an alternative.

...and? HN is already like that... I'm not here to give people the benefit of the doubt. I'm lookin' for minds at work. At the first sign that no mind is working, I'm gone

the same way United States Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart defined porn in Jacobellis v. Ohio, you know it when you see it

Sloppy and low effort reply. Claude does a better job. I'd paste the output but it's against the rules on HN.

You can find it on lobsters though, where I did post the full reply along with the prompt in response to the exact same cop out. To this day, it's the only coherent definition of "slop" in the entire 300+ comment thread I posted it in. Not bad for a clanker, huh?

Ain't no point being proud of what you didn't do

It's not pride, it's disappointment in my fellow humans.

perhaps wasn't your intent, but this clearly demonstrates the benefit of those kinds of rules for everybody around both on codeberg and here. and you're still here

I'm... unsure how to feel. On one hand I have the utmost sympathy for the idea of pushing people away from disposable software and towards collaboration. On the other hand this will definitely devolve into name calling and vigilantism. On the third hand, Github is already drowning in slop. It takes up huuuuge amounts of resources and delivers a tiiiiny amount of value to the platform per line of slop code

> On the other hand this will definitely devolve into name calling and vigilantism.

No doubt. Just look at Lobsters.

A quality filter would have been more effective.

You have to understand that this isn't about everyone being altruistic towards everyone else. When the industry declared that AI would replace humans, even perhaps make every single person worthless, they guaranteed beyond all doubt that the vitriol would reach at least these levels. There's no point in extending kindness to people whose stated goal is your extinction. At that point what's left is war.

Then war it is. Like I told the fine people of Lobsters, they're going to take out a lot of innocent people as collateral damage during their crusade. I've already soft quit that site, and there goes Codeberg as well. What can you do?

I don't disagree, but it is not within my power to do anything to change that. There exists no person who could call off the backlash to the AI movement

I'm not following. Your last comment on Lobsters[0] was 4 days ago, that's not soft quitting. And even if it is, how is soft quitting war?

[0]: https://lobste.rs/~matheusmoreira

I used to post a lot more. I took the "be part of the community" rule pretty seriously and really tried. I dramatically cut down on my participation after the "ban AI slop" meta threads made me feel like I was not welcome due to my AI use. Getting straight up called a "slop fetishist" will do that.

Since then I've been mostly participating on veqq's lobster interview threads. My highest posting volume was in my own interview thread. The interview itself took place before all of these unfortunate events. Veqq is a really nice person, one of a select few who told me they were sad to see me go, even though we have different viewpoints on AI.

> how is soft quitting war?

Culture war, I suppose.

Personally, I'm overjoyed to see the internet stratify and the chuds depart for whatever libertarian/accelerationist pastures they're looking for. I just want to chat with human beings about human endeavors. If that shrinks my social network by several orders of magnitude — even better. Much easier to catch up.

Lobsters will probably be fine.

"Chuds" ?

Lobsters is the definition of a toxic community. Here at least you can create a throwaway account to have a controversial opinion. There you need vested invited, and get banned if you post some uncomfortable truth. Been there, done that. Same goes for mastodon.social.

Oh, really? And what uncomfortable truths have you been slinging?

Honestly? I don't remember exactly, something about a software project not being automatically bad for not implementing a code of conduct praising certain sexual deviances (woof)?

I clearly remember why my account with lots of photos was deleted from mastodon.social without warning: There was a poll "Have you donated to the Antifa", two options: no / I'm a fascist. I replied there is some more nuance to the topic, also in some jurisdictions the organization is listed as a terrorist organization, and as such it is illegal to do so, link to an example (us in those days, it was in the news). Well, apart from some nice photos nothing of value was lost, also it was a great lesson why you need to self-host and not rely on "self-moderating communities" or megacorps...

Some taboo of that "community"... much like free healthcare or unionization or illegal migration is slave labour (and class warfare against the working class, including legal migrants and legal guest-workforce) in disguise (was banned from a VC funded SV echo-chamber for this opinion) are taboos of this "community".

Guess I'm an extremist... or just Eastern-European.

I joined mastodon.social not too long ago... How unfortunate.

Do you know of any fediverse that won't instaban me if I accidentally post some wrongthink?

No, unfortunately I cannot. I decided that the fediverse is not for me.

A friend of mine wanted to host a lemmy instance, but as soon as he opened registration it got flooded with pornography, even worse: mostly illegal. He deleted the instance immediately. This also gives me some sympathy for the moderation work that needs to be put in, which in turn makes disgruntled, or not fully aligned mods overreach, yet I don't want to be on the bad side of a tired mod.

Also I realized that I'm only mildly interested in the topics people usually discuss on these media. I contemplated self-hosting before, but realized it is not worth the hassle, I have a blog I don't have time to tend, or the important happenings in my life do not belong to the public.

Maybe it was an uncomfortable falsehood? I've found this is much more often the case.

That's a controversial stance. The first statement of not using codeberg hosted projects to train LLMs makes sense. But to outright ban LLM coded projects seems just silly. If the problem is that users have too many vibe coded projects, then limiting the number of projects seems like a more reasonable stance. To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them. I get that this is being spun as an effort to save resources, but this is a pretty blunt way to accomplish this. And a great way to alienate a lot of potential users.

It's their service and they can choose what they want to host. Maybe they don't see themselves as competing with Github and Gitlab and so they are happy serving the users they have. But to me this does not seem to be a great growth strategy.

I think you're right, quotas have been around as long as multi-user systems.

Their argument was economic, an economic solution would be good:

"It seems like many ‘vibe coders’ don't realize that they don't actually have a community around them. They build projects as if they had, and spend resources accordingly. We see projects having a lot of code activity, heavy CI/CD testing, frequent and large release binaries. Sometimes, it feels like the amount of supported platforms exceeds the amount of actual users.

To us, it seems ridiculous to see projects with a single developer and virtually no users consuming as much or even more resources than some of the largest community projects on Codeberg, which operate frugal with CI/CD and storage resources. We do not believe it is reasonable for Codeberg to invest our precious donation money into hosting of large ghost projects"

Ultimately, democracy is a respectable form of government and the group is free to change their mind later.

> To completely ban vibe coded projects just limits the number of users that will use them.

here lies the fundamental misunderstanding by many people in this thread.

Is the objective of Codeberg to host as many projects as possible on its own server? I do not believe so!

The question then becomes "what is Codeberg's objectives?"

It's not to become the world's largest code forge instance! It's to build a set of FOSS tools for FOSS software development. Look at [0], for example, which lists alternatives.

But perhaps most importantly, the FOSS tooling can be self hosted, right? There's still a notion of freedom there.

[0] https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/what-is-codeberg/#...

Silly is how it is handled and communicated. I want clear rules, not a rant that electricity is expensive!

I have bunch of projects and sites there for a year+, most of them are llm generated.

What is a grace period for existing projects to move? What are criteria for deciding what is "vibe coded"? If i get banned, is the repo just deleted, or made readonly...

Codeberg had outage for last 5 days, where some repos could not be commited into. I expected post mortem analysis, not this debate!

> what is a grace period

Immediate. They can be deleted tomorrow.

> What are criteria

Common sense

> Is the repo just deleted

Probably. What would be the point of archiving (what they perceive as) garbage?

Given that they're a non-profit membership association with explicitly political goals where every new user represents a direct cost to the organization, and not a startup on a comfortable cushion of VC moneybags looking to pump the numbers for a quick acquisition, I very much doubt that a "growth strategy" is what they're going for here.

They obviously care more about social performance than code.

They just tanked my interest in ever checking them out.

I'm not crazy about this:

> We acknowledge that many developers have started to embrace LLMs as a tool in their workflows. Some use it extensively and rarely code by hand, others delegate only specific tasks to it. We understand that you want to know how the change affects your projects going forward. While we can't give an easy answer, we'll share some remarks that should address most of the concerns raised in the discussion.

Where terms and conditions are concerned I really do value "easy answers".

Specific change to ToS: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/org/commit/96fac426a32d1ba91ff...

> 7. You must not share projects that mostly consist of code written by "generative AI"-tools (including services such as Claude, OpenAI Codex). Such projects having an unclear copyright status (see requirements § 2 (1) 1 and § 2 (1) 3) and furthermore have little safeguards to ensure that they do not include harmful code (c.f. § 2 (1) 5).

The rationale in the ToS change and the rationale in the blog post don't match up.

The ToS change grammar could do with tightening up as well.

Maybe you shouldn’t use a platform that lets the users vote on policy then?

> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.

They have no idea what "slop" is. They don't want to have to define it with any precision. Ironically, these rules will be enforced based on vibes.

Well, I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is. Basically everyone has some idea, see how often many different people here on HN comment "this is pure slop".

Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable. Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.

I think, for these two though errors your train-of-thought is already invalid.

Further, I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary. Especially that the assumed non-existence of a definition would lead to inaction.

But ... if that would imply that we cannot do any action because we don't have a perfect definition, then I again would disagree. In "real life" we e.g. have laws that defines various crimes, e.g. "theft", "murder", "terrorist act" and what not. None of these definitions is perfect. Often they match, but every so often it's not really clear if they apply. In such cases a judge or a jury has to decide.

And that is possible today with things that people perceive as "slop". Someone could just decide. Based on a (imprecise) definition, based on tradition? Like in the judicial system.

There are also many cases where people don't use definitions and still exactly know what's going on. Look e.g. at 5 year old kids. They start to have an idea of property -- and are already very good to know then "this is mine" or "you thieved it" applies and when not. I am however quite sure they can't recite a definition of property or thievedom.

> I don't agree that they have NO idea of what slop is.

There's no way for anyone reading their rules to know if their projects are slop. It's full of "mostly" and "significantly". That's virtually guaranteed to boil down to "we don't like it".

So "they didn't know how to define it" is about the most charitable interpretation I can muster. Alternative interpretations, such as "the vagueness is a feature since it enables selective enforcement", are also available, and they only get more and more uncharitable.

> Also your claim "they DON'T WANT to have to define" is unproofable.

Had they wanted to define it, they would have done so.

> Neither you nor me have any insight into what "they" want or don't want.

I have insight into their actions, and I'm perfectly capable of inferring context and motives from them.

> I'd even argue that precision in such a definition isn't necessary.

None of this is strictly necessary. Nevertheless, it is desirable that things be precisely defined so that people can know where they stand. Depending on the exact definition, I may or may not be welcome. Therefore I'm not going back there without a precise definition.

If I showed you an image with black sections and red sections, would you be able to decide whether it was mostly black or mostly red?

I could write a script that could tell you the sum total of red and black pixels.

This is more like asking someone colorblind which shade of red the image is closer to.

You don't know which parts of your project are AI output? And even if you did know, you couldn't know whether it was mostly AI or mostly not AI?

I was thinking recently about Dijkstra's position on proving the correctness of your programs, and how by his standards, we've all been going by vibes long before AI.

Maybe they use the definition from the HN guidelines [0]:

> Don't post generated text or AI-edited text. HN is for conversation between humans.

Does this change your view of HN? Of Codeberg? Of vibe enforced rules?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don’t care about HN the same way I care about my development platform. If I want to show someone my life’s work I don’t send then to HackerNews.

Wait, why am I commenting here then?

You just expect platforms implement “no AI content” rules based on what you care about more. I mean you should leave the platform if you want to create more AI life’s work and they don’t let you, not everything works for everybody, but you can’t come out and object on principle when you accept it elsewhere. This is good for the people who want to signal there’s no AI slop in their work.

And if it’s your life work maybe you want to not hand it to every random platform out there, which can change rules on a whim, and instead host it yourself and own it with your own rules.

That rule's for HN comments, not submissions. Nobody's getting kicked out for vibecoding a project.

You’re trying to make a meaningless distinction to justify holding different parties to different standards: comments are HN’s core content, code is Codeberg’s core content.

HN submissions are links to other platform, so not HN content. Codeberg will let you have links to AI generated content on another platform (like a GH link) so that’s not a worthwhile distinction.

Each platform states a “no AI generated content on our platform” rule or guideline. If you want to resolve the cognitive dissonance that was created when you realized HN does it too, may I suggest using a single standard for both rather than jumping on the weakest way out?

That's fair.

HN is a social network. Its value is human comments. People come here to see what the tech circles are saying.

A git host's value is in the source code it hosts, not who wrote it. Before all this, Codeberg was all about free software. This has a very precise definition. Free software communities used to gatekeep based on a very simple test: is it free software or proprietary software? The problem is people have started gatekeeping cryptocurrency, LLM usage. The definitions are imprecise, there's no telling where it's going to stop, and it causes needless fragmentation.

They will just put it to user vote, same way all their policy is decided.

> The second vote was more controversial, but was also accepted with 358 agreements vs 144 disagreements (and 14 abstentions), with a high voter turn-out of around 50% of active members.

No thanks. I get enough of that bullshit in my own country.

Basically a popularity contest. It's high school all over again.

It is worse as in these cases any worldwide activist group can just pile into your small local high school and fore their "popularity" on you.

What do you propose is a better way of deciding things?

Sometimes the right move is to do nothing.

And sometimes, decisions have to be made.

Deliberative democracy is a thing.

High School keeps being funded, though.

> 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 really don't want to join a commons where something I make might be "tolerated in practice" based on a given moderator's vibe. Which I suppose is the message I was meant to receive from the issue that passed the vote.

"Side projects with little resource usage"

Wow so they banned literally everything?

It's an opinionated charity host for free software. Are you actually making free software or just dumping your junk that is technically free but no one uses? If the latter, they're telling you to go away.

They reserved the right to ban anything based on exceedingly vague policies.

Whether something is someone's side project or not is independent of the amount of users or the presence of a community. They can now ban any project with a single maintainer that exceeds an arbitrary resource limit.

Basically they're putting a gun to your head demanding you to always be popular enough to curry their favour.

When you think about how most projects start unpopular by definition, the only way to host on Codeberg is first by becoming popular on another platform and then moving to Codeberg, but if that is true why bother migrating? The moment your project's popularity fades or you lose maintainers, the project will get axed by Codeberg.

So basically the lesson you're getting here is to not trust the altruistic stranger. His motivations are less sincere than the ones of the self interested stranger.

Is dang on HN doing the same? Is he putting a gun to your head?

wow so codeberg is goated?

No, you want to be able to host whatever code, not kicked off based on whatever the hate train is on to today.

i'm not an idiot. i can just a git repo in a variety of ways. it's just a bunch of text.

Oh, shoot. Though I don't have many vibecoded projects, when I decided to move to Codeberg from Github the first project I pushed to codeberg was a vibecoded one

I guess there is a bright side too: it forces me to selfhost my repos, something I planned to do since years.

this is fun! I'm excited to see what they'll ban two weeks from now