I don't like these blanket bans, are they going to ban torrent clients next?
this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2026
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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.
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.
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
The US government excels at "do as I say, not as I do."
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is arguably a worse situation then. They aren’t naming crypto as banned, they are naming a vague hand wave as banned. Literally anything can be interpreted as harming Codebergs reputation. Hell, is reputation defined, or is that something that can be decided on the fly? “Our reputation as an anti emulation company is being harmed so we have banned all emulator projects.”
This is the kind of vague shit we get mad at corpos for, don’t give them a thumbs up for the exact same behavior.
Not 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.
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
Yeah but what if the kids use it?
I know! We’ll force age verification into it!
/s
My impression of the folks cheering this on are mostly opposed to crypto on environmental grounds.
Personally, I’m more just weirded out by a policy like this. Even though I’m not a crypto fan, it seems like a really unusual hill to die on for an OSS hosting app.
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.
[^1]: unsubstantiated hyperbole.
The 870 tonnes of CO2 the E network now produces for yearly operation is equivalent to eating 290000 cheeseburgers, as much as the world eats burgers in one day and one hour.
It's equal to the calories contained in that many cheeseburgers or expended while eating? Or in making that many cheeseburgers? And are we talking like Big Macs or Whoppers?
I was curious, and redid the math using cars (a unit I can understand). Works out to about 370 cars. That's equivalent to like... 0.0006 cars per user.
Sources:
https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle
10.1109/CICTN64563.2025.10932395
https://ycharts.com/indicators/ethereum_daily_active_addresses
Production. Meat production (factory farming) is the largest CO2 source.
Sure are a lot of cryptobros upset about this on lemmy
I'm surprised to see lemmy users defending liberticide and authoritarian decisions.
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.
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.
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.
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So Codeberg had banned vibe codes projects and cryptocurrency projects, and you have a project that is neither vibe coded nor involving cryptocurrency?
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Sure, but it is a scam, and I also don't want child porn projects on my hosting platform.
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?
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".
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Self-hosted Gitlab is the answer - I really don't trust any cloud platform especially when they start to get opinionated like this
Yeah, looks like self host is the way.
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.
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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?
They also are thinking to ban projects that use LLMs.. so uh.
Already banned
Well I'm banning codeberg. Whether you like crypto or LLM doesn't matter. They are censoring developers like that.
It's not up to codeberg to decide where developers are allowed to work on or which tools to use. It's the start of the end.
Sounds like they're willing to ban anything "unpopular." Not a good sign for serious development.
I agree. Just banning projects because they work on topic x. Or use tool y. This is just outright censorship, censoring developers doesn't fit a codeberg imo.
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