Item — HN Reader

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.

[1] https://codeberg.org/Codeberg/Community/issues/2184#issuecom...

5 comments

> 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.

That's not true. You can definitely think critically about the political context of things without being partizan about things.

Taking a stance does not mean you adopted an "us vs. them" mentality.

What a bonkers generalization.

Do you also see your local library hosting Mein Kampf as statement of support for fascism on part of the librarian?

It is a political statement about the freedom of press though, no? Some libraries ban books, others do not. But that doesn’t mean it’s not political.

No, but it is a result of international western politics that Mein Kampf is widely available to read

I think it's generally understood that people read Mein Kampf because they want to understand Hitler and not because they agree with him.

Not always! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk3lcEeoEy8

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.

How do you know what the politics will be next?

They banned vibe coded projects too… goodness knows how they think they can determine / enforce that.

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.

> Well, if you're not part of the community, what do you care?

One benefits from the availability of alternatives and a healthy market regardless.

When I go to a vegetarian restaurant I don't demand they serve me a juicy meat burger.

We have different places with different philosophies. It is okay to be different, otherwise everything would look boringly identical.

Sincerely, A meat lover and a codeberg fan.

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.

GitHub, Gitlab, Bitbucket, Codeberg, SourceForge, SourceHut, and that's just from the top of my head. That's not what I call "vanishingly rare"

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.

What is a "reasonable GitHub alternative" exactly?

They may be troubled but Codeberg owes them precisely nothing

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%.

Did you know that Australia requires everyone to vote in national elections?

There are also systems that exist between “legally mandated voting” and “whoever shows up”.

You could even set different thresholds based on the importance of the issue! (Decisions like ToS changes would seem to be quite important.)

I was pretty clear, it passed according to their rules, it didn't gain a majority of members support. Both can, and in this case are true.

> How do you know what the politics will be next?

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.

> How do you know what the politics will be next?

That's the neat part, you don't.

(Or, well, you could pay attention to the individual humans involved?)

> 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)?

This is why I don't use Mastodon. What you can see is completely reliant on what kind of politics the admin supports at that time.

But you use HN, where what you can see is completely reliant on what kind of politics the admin supports at that time?

Admins on HN rarely delete articles

Yes, because the admins are reasonable. Just like it's possible to find Mastodon servers with reasonable admins.

But the GPs comment blamed Mastodon as a whole for allowing the possibility of admin abuse, which isn't substantially different from HN.

> goodness knows how they think they can determine that

Asking people to define that nearly got me kicked out of lobsters.

These people don't want to have to define it. Ironically, they're going to enforce their rules based on vibes. Vibewritten rules, vibenforced.

A side effect of platform vs publisher.

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.

> platform vs publisher

No such distinction exists. It was a just-so story made up by people trying to push the idea that moderation created a legal liability.

And it's German, anyway. The DMCA doesn't even apply there.

Indeed we see legislation (from all sides of politics and nations) saying there is no distinction, that all services and websites are now publishers.

It was ever thus except when we remember.

There never was a distinction. You made it up or believed someone who made it up.

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?

It's not a single political front, they have members (those who sponsor hosting), they decide by vote

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.

Are you upset you got door-rejected from a kinky rave in Berlin? Which one?

Honestly I respect it