In the words of the person who announced the ban, when moderating a discussion on it 8 months prior:[1]
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
> the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives.
They do not believe this because this is simply not the reality we live in
> Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
They are correct in this view. No matter how "apolitical" platforms like Github and various maintainers of open source projects pretend to be, the reality is that creating, hosting and distributing code is highly political and should be treated as such.
Yeah. It's like everybody's forgetting that github also bans things, such as certain projects that receive DMCA takedown requests.
And github pushing its LLM garbage into Visual Studio. If banning crypto or LLM's is political, so too must be pushing them on people who don't want them and very loudly object.
It's only 'political' when someone is trying to divert from the actual, specific subject of a discussion. It's a thought-stopping tactic, not actual substantive criticism.
No, it's not. If you see everything through these political lense, you end up constantly in a us vs them mentality. Or a "you're either with us, or against us". I don't think it's healthy.
It really is. Hosting requires a server owned by a company or private individual located in a country. The goals of these companies/individuals and the pressures put on them by their countries are quite political - and as a result hosting becomes political.
Not always, but usual. It isn't that strange for a library to have a copy and it isn't that strange to check it out although the librarian is definitely checking you for swastika tattoos.
Well, if you're not part of the community, what do you care?
Are you saying you are opposed to this on the grounds that anything could happen in the future? That doesn't really make sense. Yes, anything could happen. Yes, people change. That is true in nearly all contexts.
If you're asking in good faith, you participate in the community democratically and try to influence others. Just like normal.
There was a vote held for this decision, it was 306-154.
It's a bit of an inappropriate comparison though, since restaurants are ubiquitous and reasonable GitHub alternatives are vanishingly rare. People are quite rightly more troubled when providers in a low-cardinality space become unviable.
You can literally take the exact same software that Codeberg uses, Forgejo, and stand up your own alternative with different policies, with the only real cost being operational in nature. It seems less the case that it's a "low-cardinality space", and more that people feel entitled to other people's labour under their own terms.
Only GitHub and Gitlab have a large intersection of features. You can probably choose around one from the rest of the list, if they happen to have what you need.
They have 1085 Voters, only 306 Voters voted for the proposal, and it passed. That might clear their governance requirements on paper, its certainly not a majority of their eligible voting community.
Ok, have you ever been part of a directly democratic organization? Not everyone shows up to every meeting or every vote. An organization I was a part of had quorum at 10%.
I was very tempted to reply with a ”always has been” astronaut meme, or possibly Morpheus ”what if I told you” meme. But I would not have contributed in a good manner like that.
The way I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political.
An I mean it, even driving at the speed limit is in a sense a political act saying ”I respect the laws by our politicians”.
Working 40 hours a week is a political number.
Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
People sometimes want politics to be neatly siloed away, but politics is deeply embedded in our society and I think we would be better off embracing it instead of fighting it. Because maybe then discussions about it can be more productive.
> Or another example from where I live, there are two major grocery chains, one of which has owners who were recently convicted of insider trading and price fixing, and openly supports anti-LGBTQ movements. Shopping there is a political act implicitly supporting their political cause and accepting their crimes as okay, even though it might seem far removed.
The trouble with this reasoning is that it's always an isolated demand for rigor.
This other of the major grocery store chains, does it sell food produced by factory farms or huge unsavory agribusiness corps? Are any of its major shareholders the Wall St jerks who do all the sort of thing Wall St jerks do, or anyone else who isn't a good person? It probably sells to anyone who walks in the door without checking who they are, so they could be far-<disfavored side> extremists. Can you support a company whose customers are such people?
The world is extremely interconnected. As soon as you open up looking not at what some company or person is doing themselves but at what anyone who works for them or supplies them or buys from them is doing, there will be someone you don't like. And then whether you're refusing to do business with them depends not on whether that is the case, since it is always the case, but instead on who is whispering in your ear to tell you who to hate.
There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, you and I know that.
The other major chain is a consumer’s cooperative, which is owned by the members and has no stock dividend or major stock ownership. Instead ”dividends” are paid on basis of how much you money spent at the stores (somewhere around 0.5% is repaid as redeemable cheques I think). Each region of stores has yearly meetings where members are allowed to voice opinions and discuss proposals on things like that. It’s certainly not perfect, but that doesn’t mean it’s not better.
> There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, you and I know that.
Why did you include the qualifier "under capitalism"? Is it ethical to be supporting Mao or Stalin rather than Rockefeller?
> The other major chain is a consumer’s cooperative, which is owned by the members and has no stock dividend or major stock ownership.
That's great, now how does it get you out of the problem? Not only do you have all the other members profiting from your consumption and by the numbers some of them will be undesirable, the coop itself is still part of the system. When they take out a loan to buy the building or pay rent to a landlord, the money goes to the bank/landlord. The coop has to pay the market price for the space in the city with the crooked zoning board, driving up profits for the real estate speculators paying them off. When the coop sells you a box of Cheerios, the profits still go to Nestlé, which has been involved in scandals on everything from baby formula to environmental pollution to labor practices. The other major companies have had their own scandals and the minor brands are often the same product in a different box.
And you're missing the most fundamental part of the problem: You don't actually know these people. That shareholder of the other grocery chain, were they convicted of insider trading because they did it, or because the prosecutor filed a charge they couldn't prove and then had to save face by offering a deal to pay a fine less than the legal expenses would be to vindicate themselves in court? The anti-LGBTQ movements, was it a billion dollars to a warlord murdering gay people, or a thousand dollars to a PAC that thinks there might be a reason women's sports exists separately from men's? These things are at least a difference in degree, and that's what matters when you're choosing between alternatives that are all less than perfectly pristine. Moreover, you would need to know not just all of these specific details about them, but all of these specific details about everyone else, before you could determine who is actually better on balance. Is that guy better or worse than Nestlé? When you go to the coop, do you know for every product which company makes it, and who they do business with? Nobody can hold all of that in their head and much of it isn't even public information.
And then we're back to the actual problem. Who is telling you who to hate? When nobody is perfect, anybody can be made into the villain just by selectively highlighting or exaggerating their flaws and ignoring the ones in the alternative.
Just because most of everything has a political angle/facet does not mean it defines my life as much as it seem to do to you. It just serves to help me articulate my choices in life.
I would like to know how taking an active moral stand as Codeberg is doing is lazy. Especially when put in relation to armchair analysis on social media.
Your post I responded you had said "I have come to understand it is that everything is indeed political."
Now you concede a bit:
> Just because most of everything has a political angle/facet does not mean it defines my life as much as it seem to do to you.
You are morally lazy if you think magnifying the political aspect of any relationship is sensible. You've defined no limit to it, which has obvious outcomes. An intuitive limit is insufficient.
You've also got confused and accused me of 'making things political' when my comment is very clearly recommending the opposite - a sort of childish "no you."
> Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?
I think your implication is that Codeberg have recently demonstrated they’re the kind of people who banned multiple significant categories (there’s probably a better word?) of software this week, so they probably will continue and ban a a number of additional software categories in the coming year(s)?
They are voluntarily choosing to be a publisher. Publishers are responsible for the actions that the users do on their platform.
States are happier with and want more publishers as it's easier to censor, add surveillance and control them than neutral platforms.
The few past times when Cloudfare censored politically was interesting as they quickly made apologies because they want to be seen more as a neutral platform than a service that nation states can control.
It's why modern internet legislation across all parties and across all nations is geared towards changing platforms into publishers.
And it's why the services that we would have seen to be independent and neutral in the past are choosing this new paradigm.
I'm trying to find more information about their politics. But all I found was their bylaws and a gay flag. Maybe I'm supposed to read between the lines?
In the left-wing spheres here, terms such as "political act" or "solidarity" are just bloat used to make your message sound more left wing. It's a faux pas not to virtue signal in a way that sounds radical and ensures that it won't affect anyone from outside your bubble as well.
An example from recently would be posters for an expensive kinky rave in Berlin offering discounted "solidarity tickets" for refugees, trans folks, sex workers, and BIPOC people. The dress code alone ensures that it's only friends of friends using these labels who will get in anyway.
Pluralism is when strangers are forced to host my code for free. The idea of somebody else putting their time and money into something and then not giving it to me is philosophically worrisome
No, there's a big difference between "net effects are not guaranteed to be perfectly neutral" and "I am going to intentionally put my thumb on the scale".
The position that everything is political so therefore opinions are mandatory intentionally conflates these things.
My issue with this is not that codeberg and its members want to uphold a certain set of political beliefs. Any private organization is free to do that. It's that they haven't defined the rule that's supposed to encode those beliefs.
As written, the rule is a non-exhaustive example of "content that harms codeberg's reputation". Someone asked in the pr whether "cryptocurrency-related" is defined anywhere and it merged without an answer. The responses to wording concerns was essentially they will figure it out later. Moves like this don't fill me with confidence.
Real-world lines are blurry. If you try to define a bright line, someone finds a loophole. Like the other thread (about codeberg banning vibecoded projects) had arguments about whether a project with 49.999% generated code would count. Which is based on a category error - things just don't work that way.
It sounds like Codeberg needs to define both clear guidelines and a systematic process by which potential violations of the policy can be fairly reviewed and/or appealed—table stakes for a system that’s going to be integrated into your project as a hosting provider and community hub.
What you seem to be arguing for is seat-of-the-pants reactive mob governance. Functional communities and societies don’t work that way.
Yeah, well we’ll see what the future holds. Based on past experience, without well-defined procedures, I expect activists will eventually seize control of the process and go after devs/projects that they have personal grievances with. I will not use or recommend Codeberg until they put some structure around this.
You're still not understanding the point. It's not about an organization being "private" or "public" (what does "private" even mean?). Everything is political. When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political, obscuring/obfuscating their actual underlying politics, and everything else is pushed outside of it. It is an attempt to create strict boundaries around the limits of discussion and action, which is itself a political act!
>When you try and cleave society into things that are and aren't political, what you are doing is creating a normative set of things that aren't allowed to be challenged, on the basis of your claim that they aren't political
What are you talking about? Whether something is allowed to be challenged has nothing to do with whether it's political. Actually, what even is not allowed to be challenged? I struggle to come up with a single example.
Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd. There is always an underlying politics, even if it has been normalized or obfuscated, repressed or unexamined. Reread my above comment.
Is the set of acceptable uses for shared infrastructure not a political question? What's different between mining crypto on a free CI server, letting my cows eat all the grass at the park, or dumping industrial waste into the river?
Most people distinguish practical questions from normative questions. Practical questions may have some small political component, but usually it’s not useful or constructive to consider them as political issues.
Some practical questions have an obvious political dimension, in which case it’s fair to consider that component, but people will often argue over whether the question is “political enough” to justify debate. To deal with this, you need processes to ensure that debate is contained but not overly restricted on this kind of issue.
Making every question political is a trick right out of the OSS Simple Sabotage Field Manual. Whether to pay the hosting bill shouldn’t be a political question. Whether to change hosts may or may not be, depending on the reasoning.
It's political as in it contains politics. Yes paying the hosting bill is political for at least three reasons (belief in the value of money and capitalism, belief that specific host should not be boycotted, belief the whole organisation agrees you get more value from the hosting than from keeping the money). That doesn't mean a political debate is needed every time it's time to pay it. It does mean that if someone says "hey this hosting provider is also hosting kiwifarms, should we really give them money?" a response of "paying the hosting isn't political" is incorrect.
You didn't answer my question about what is not allowed to be challenged.
>Yes, in communities that try to claim that certain things are "political" and certain things are "not political", "banning cryptocurrency" could be rejected on the basis that it is "political". The point is that saying something like "we don't do politics" is absurd.
I don't understand what you're saying. You switched tracked halfway through the thought from talking about communities that distinguish between things that are or aren't political to rejection of taking political stances.
What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on political issues. This is not merely not absurd, but pretty much necessary for any organization that doesn't have ideological goals and doesn't want to foster internal factions.
Like the sibling comment said, just banning cryptocurrency might be political or it might not, depending on the reason for it. Rejecting reasons such as "crypto bad" is a tenable position if an organization seeks to maintain a neutral stance.
Every organization has ideological goals. That's what I'm getting at. Sometimes they are unable to recognize it because it's been normalized. What you define as "neutral" is not actually neutral. Such statements are themselves attempts at controlling what is normal/acceptable. The terms of acceptable discussion is context-dependent, but trying to set them at "politics" is contradictory, as I've explained.
To name one easy example, for-profit companies don't have ideological goals.
But just for the sake of argument I'll grant it and amend my statement: What is usually meant by "we don't do politics" is that an institution or organization will avoid picking sides on irrelevant political issues. A cat shelter doesn't need to have an official position on abortion to function, and in all likelihood having one would be counter to its purposes.
Maximizing profit is already an ideological goal. Some companies have others subordinate to it. For example Microsoft is committed to stack ranking, Google is committed to only promoting people who ship new products and then kill them, Apple is committed to each team not knowing what the other is doing so they don't leak it, and Oracle is committed to suing its customers for more money.
No I understand that. But the point I am making is saying that is much stronger than saying "our policy says we won't host crypto projects going forward". The latter is fine, any service provider can set terms as they fit within the law. But if you claim you are highly political, you must invite further questions into it.
How does Codeberg handle the diverse mix of politics within it and manage its influences? If we give the organization a character by calling it political, we create an obligation to explain further.
Overall, again I feel this is a self-own to project idealogue this hard since you flavor it in a specific way that is not inclusive.
No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
The notion that "everything is political" is an indicator that someone has an extremely toxic relationship with politics. Basically you're projecting your unhealthy level of political engagement onto everyone else, and insisting that we all have that manner of thinking (but are just denying it to score political points). Well that isn't true, and for your own sake I encourage you to stop that. You'll be much happier when you stop making life about politics.
> No dude. Most things are not, in fact, political. When I enjoy a meal, that isn't political. When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political. When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What do you eat and what do you refuse to eat? Which restaurants would you go to or not? Which companies do you buy from and why/why not?
Who do you meet with and who do you avoid? What do you talk about and which topics do you avoid?
Where is your cocoa grown, which brand do you buy and who ends up making money on your purchase?
Even if you reduce it to that, you still endorse (or at least accept) the side effects of the production of what you eat.
If you eat meat, you are okay with the effects it has on climate change, and that’s political. If you do the opposite and don’t eat meat, that’s also political.
If you consume food from non-organic agriculture, you are okay with species extinction, especially insects.
If you buy the cheapest foods, you are okay with the working conditions and low pay necessary to reach the price. If you buy a more expensive option, who in the value chain benefits from the increased price and who doesn’t?
Almost everything that you do is political in some way.
That's disregarding that the people in power routinely make it as difficult as possible to have a choice. If you buy the cheapest foods, maybe it's because you want to eat and pay rent, and spending any more than that would render you homeless. Becoming homeless will not save the poor in another country, even if your purchases to avoid becoming homeless would have contributed a vanishingly tiny, indirect amount to their plight.
I agree that everything is political, and it's good to make choices as ethically as you can, but sometimes it simply isn't possible to be perfect. You can't even know about all the problems without studying them like a full time job. Ain't got time for that. Gotta eat.
The "agonize over every purchase and vote with your dollar" paradigm gives the most votes to billionaires.
Should people think about ethics when buying stuff: yes.
Does failing to recycle a bottle properly, or buying a cheap chocolate bar that may have involved underpaid or even slave labor somewhere in its supply chain, mean someone is evil? Nope.
I wish people would spend less time agonizing or moralizing over what individuals do (even though an individual is easier to influence quickly) and more time going after the broken systems, stupid laws, and malignant CEOs that actually lie at the root of the problems.
What food do you eat, and where do you eat it? How much does it cost? Culturally, where does it come from? Who works the kitchens? Who cleans the place?
> When I hang out with my family and friends, that isn't political.
Where do you hang out? Who else goes there? Who even are your friends?
> When I sit down to read a nice book with a cup of cocoa, that isn't political.
What book are you reading? Does the country you live produce the cocoa you are drinking? Do you know where it comes from?
Everything is political to an extent, even the reason we have this discussion in English when English is not my native language.
I am not saying you have to think about those things all the time; that would be exhausting. But ignoring it and pretend everything is separated into its own nice little happy vacuum is too naive.
So I am very pedantic here, but yes it "can" be seen as political. You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
I understand "everything is political" more in a sense that we as a society have the burden to shape our own rules, and saying "I only live in the society, but ignore the burden of making rules" is not really possible. In that case you actively decide to let someone else decide for you.
>You made the decision that your free time is more important than working and generating value.
How is that political? It's just a decision based on competing priorities. By this interpretation an animal's decision to either sleep or eat is also political.
I don't understand how the two are related, though. Voting yearly as a community does not make things "political" if the issues are not politically challenged themselves. For example, if a group of people get together and decide "hey we want to watch 10 movies this year" that in itself is not a political action. It's a governance action. But if they say, "Hey, let's watch these 10 movies but not watch 1 because we all think it is wrong to capitalize on bananas," that is a political action. In the first one, your individual politics do not matter for consensus but in the second one, it does and as a whole you need to take a stance on a subjective political matter as an organization. And if you take a stance as an organization, you must also accept the consequences of not being impartial which they don't seem to do. "It is political but the details of how/why/what votes are decided, how we think of politics, how it influences our worldwide, our basic ethical code etc are all unknown. BUT IT IS POLITICAL so buzz off." is not a good stance in my opinion, especially for a version control tool.
"So buzz off" (whether a direcy quote or not) seems like a sign they accept the consequence of some people buzzing off.
If they didn't do this, they'd have to accept the consequences of those people not buzzing off, or potentially a different segment of people buzzing off.
Doing nothing isn't an apolitical option either. That's a choice too.
> > Dear Codeberg, please push out and ban these political fighters.
> This is not a neutral space, Codeberg is political. If you disagree with someone, be constructive and don't call them merely political and think that's a reason for the discussion to stop.
the maintainers of Codeberg do not believe that they are a "coffee hosting service" that neutrally hosts code from a variety of perspectives. Their view is that hosting code is a political act and this is backed by the donations funding Codeberg's operation.
[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...