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I moderate r/selfhosted and we tried to enforce this rule almost 1:1, so let me predict on how this is going to go based on my experience.

1. You try to ban low quality vibe-coded projects, but try to not ban high quality projects that made use of AI. The goal is to send a message on what you deem acceptable. 2. Anyone creating what you deem a low quality vibe-coded project sees their project as belong to the second kind of project and therefore insists that their project is allowed. So how do you make sure what category a project belongs to? You might use scripts to identify classic trades of vibe-coded projects, look at the users history, etc. None of that is going to be bulletproof though and it is a lot of work. 3. You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place.

We ended up settling on restricting new projects instead as the majority of projects that fall into the first category don't last long. So step 4 would be to introduce some other kind of proxy for this kind of project that can actually be enforced.

2 comments

> You stop trying to enforce this rule as it is a "fight" you can't win and dealing with this takes more effort than dealing with the issues the low quality vibe-coded projects caused in the first place

Interesting observations.

The problem is not that they're vibe-coded.

The problem is that they're low-effort abandonware.

It's very hard to tell apart if something is going to get abandoned.

I certainly have more abandoned vibe-coded projects than non-abandoned ones.

But I also have ones that I use daily or weekly, and ones that have 30+ GitHub stars and open tickets and forks without I ever expected that to happen.

When I go looking for software that I need, life has become more difficult, because I need to ask myself if the project I encounter is going to get abandoned because of the low effort it took to manifest it.

Rather than judge how it's made as a proxy for how its future will turn out, judge its future: Require some kind of sustained lifetime and social engagement around a project before it is deserving of advertisement.

It's different for codeberg, because they have a lot of infrastructure they have to maintain, and are ideologically motivated to be a libre option to share peoples code. It's an entirely different motivation than promoting a subreddit that runs on reddit's infrastructure. They are really constrained on the infrastructure cost side, and stability is a constant struggle. They don't have the bandwidth to sort through the AI slop - they would probably rather ban potentially good useful projects at the expense of making codeberg a more restrictive place that people who use AI in a smart way avoid to ensure that they can provide infrastructure for libre software. I kind of see where they are coming from.

It's not just AI stuff btw. I recently evalutated hosting a static site on codeberg for a project I am working on. It is a cool project, and although it is commercial now (it's a video game) I would like it to be open source one day. It would have been a great contribution to codeberg (in my opinion)! Maybe my game can't be open source software right now; sharing open source art is a mess. But I would love to make the blog for it libre!

However, I came to the conclusion that the static page feature of codeberg simply isn't appropriate for this use case. The codeberg staff really only maintains it so that codeberg can be feature complete with other publicly available git forge hosts (github, gitlab, etc.,). It actually is a huge infrastructure burden that contributes to their instability. They have made it explicit in the past - that feature is so that libre software projects hosted there can have a static page if it would make the project better, and they don't care about any other use case. I don't need that - I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked. We simply don't have goals that align, and that is okay. I don't take it personally. The whole point of making my blog a static site was to build it locally and be host agnostic. The hosting privilege ultimately is going to Cloudflare workers.

I think that is a much healthier way to think of this sort of. The great AI deluge of code (slop) IS disrupting a lot of assumptions we made about the internet that were based on creating code that works is hard. Now creating code is easy. Creating good code may still be hard, but I think it will be healthy to re-evaulate everyone's goals and agenda's, trust in the people that act in good faith and have the best attentions in mind, and respect everyone's limitations.

This is what I love about selfhosting btw - I am a really active participant on that sub and I actually appreciate the balance you guys are trying to achieve between allowing people to share projects they think are helpful (even if some LLM code was involved) vs. not letting it be entirely overrun by crappy AI slop app spam (which opens up a lot of supply chain risk anyway). I love self hosting my software, and I have gotten a lot of use out of my self hosted Qwen model - notes only, no code generation though. Selfhosted is honestly the solution out of this mess. Empowering individuals to run the computing they need to use every day off of their own computers that they own, bringing computing to the masses. I hope we can move past this RAM market cornering BS and get back to that mission.

> I want a stable platform that will host my small static website blog at a very low cost, with high stability and uptime, no questions asked.

Maybe try the neocities supporter plan[0]? They allow custom domains, offer decent bandwidth and put a lot of effort into open source and encouraging people to write their own sites from what I can tell.

It seems like a better option than dealing with the Great Amorphous Corporate Centralizing Mass that is Cloudflare.

[0]: https://neocities.org/supporter

That sounds neat, I haven't seen it, although I think someone else mentioned they were using neocities. Do they support random static sites?

It's their entire MO; their name indicates the idea is that they are also a successor to geocities. No backend support whatsoever, just HTML/CSS/JS and whatever other files you need to host a site (images).

Their AUP isn't unreasonable: don't use them to host scams/spam people, don't abuse their services for an SEO farming operation, don't infringe on people's copyright, don't get their IPs blacklisted and don't use their services to harass or threaten people. All fairly standard as far as "we don't want to get sued/get in trouble" is concerned.

There's also an API to upload files to, shouldn't be too difficult to use it to rig up an SSG deployment script for it, or alternatively you can use their web interface to upload the resulting files. (Although it is on the assumption that you shouldn't abuse it.)