[HN Gopher] Codeberg Reaches 300k Projects
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Codeberg Reaches 300k Projects
Author : welovebunnies
Score : 188 points
Date : 2025-10-01 16:48 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (codeberg.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (codeberg.org)
| blitzo wrote:
| I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't. It's a
| shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers, of all
| people, are willingly letting their code be AI piggybacked.
| hkt wrote:
| Network effects and a corporate offering, I'd think.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Definitely network effects. For work, when I am interested in
| finding whether the authors of a research paper put up their
| code somewhere, I often type github in the search query.
| There are some others, of course, but its the default
| location. I'll be looking into this one though. I'd never
| heard of it.
| flykespice wrote:
| Also matthew affect, platforms that started early and got
| popular, tends to get more popular.
|
| Codeberg might be getting more popular, but the slope of
| growth from Github is way higher than theirs.
| anticorporate wrote:
| Name recognition, and a stubborn belief that "stars" are a
| somehow useful metric in determining the quality of a project.
| knowitnone3 wrote:
| what other metric do you propose we use? fake download
| metrics?
| neuronexmachina wrote:
| > It seems like developers, of all people, are willingly
| letting their code be AI piggybacked.
|
| Is Codeberg actually effective at preventing crawling of public
| code they host?
| cenamus wrote:
| I think the point is more about GitHubs/Microsofts own
| Copilot
| steeleduncan wrote:
| An incredibly generous free tier offering for CI/CD
| mcny wrote:
| That and I don't feel as guilty putting my hare brained
| nonsensical half baked at best personal projects that nobody
| other than me will ever clone on GitHub.
| latexr wrote:
| For many it isn't easy to just up and abandon what they built
| on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and open
| issues and PRs. Familiarity also plays a big role, you can't
| simply expect to open an account on a different forge and be
| done, it consumes time to get acquainted with the new stuff.
| Also GitHub may give access to more resources: For example, you
| can just use GitHub actions in your repo, private or public; to
| use the equivalent on Codeberg you have to request access and
| be approved.
|
| https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
|
| None of this is a defence of GitHub. But if you want to enact
| change, you have to understand the reasons why people remain in
| the status quo.
| blibble wrote:
| > For many it isn't easy to just up and abandon what they
| built on GitHub, especially if they have a big community and
| open issues and PRs.
|
| it's really easy because the codeberg importer is really good
|
| it correctly imports all your pull requests and issues,
| preserving usernames, everything
|
| you then put the new URL in the GitHub description and
| archive the project
|
| and then a year down the line you delete the GitHub
| repository entirely
|
| I moved about 70 projects, half a dozen with several hundred
| stars and forks
|
| and each major project that leaves does n^2 damage to GitHub,
| it's the network effect in reverse!
| rglullis wrote:
| Saying that as someone who keeps my open source projects
| primarily on codeberg: Getting access to Codeberg CI is a
| bureaucracy, it has outages due to DDOS attacks every other
| week and there are a good number of open source developers who
| are making non-negligible money via GH sponsors.
| dismalaf wrote:
| Codeberg doesn't allow any projects that aren't FOSS.
|
| Personally I use Gitlab.
| ashton314 wrote:
| Not quite: Codeberg discourages you from having too many
| closed source projects, but you can absolutely have private
| repositories. I have several.
|
| They explain the rules here:
| https://docs.codeberg.org/getting-started/faq/#how-about-
| pri...
| dismalaf wrote:
| How much they tolerate private projects and the specific
| rule you link is so vague it's worthless.
|
| I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes money
| they're not going to come after me for breaking terms.
| Anything less is worthless.
| blibble wrote:
| > I want 100% certainty
|
| this is completely unrealistic even if you're paying a
| company to host your stuff
| dismalaf wrote:
| It's not. If the terms of use unambiguously allow it, the
| law is on your side no matter what the host tries.
| blibble wrote:
| there's no law, it's a contract
|
| you can be sued by anyone for anything at any time,
| regardless of your opinion of "unambiguous"
| dismalaf wrote:
| Are you being intentionally obtuse?
|
| Yes, lawsuits are how contract disputes are settled. "The
| law is on your side" means a court will side with you in
| case of a lawsuit.
| blibble wrote:
| > Are you being intentionally obtuse?
|
| are you?
|
| need I remind you, you said:
|
| > I want 100% certainty that if my side project makes
| money they're not going to come after me
|
| there is NEVER any certainty that your counterparty won't
| come after you, even if you think your contract is
| "unambiguous"
|
| because that not how the system works
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| all the usual arguments. I get where he's coming from, I
| thought like this for a long time as well. I wouldn't
| pride myself in having sold all my bitcoins in 2016. I
| regret having dabbled in stuff like ethereum around that
| time when I could've just stuck with bitcoin. I just
| didn't see it. conflating the nft/dao/web3/shitcoin
| sphere with bitcoin vibe with me either. good luck to him
| with paper money, I'm going with bitcoin, come what will.
| I'm not on a mission, do what feels right. I'm not
| judging. just weirded out by the thought of someone not
| wanting OSS software of that sort to be hosted on their
| platform. where does it end? ban users who are active in
| that area outside of your platform? people are using
| postgres unethically to store illegal data, stolen pii
| and credit cards. tor is used for csam. I have
| difficulties understanding this line of thinking and it
| feels more like an ethical way to exclude a group of
| people you just don't like. could be totally wrong of
| course.
| kstrauser wrote:
| Worthless _to you_. Given that it's a free service, I
| think it's perfectly reasonable that they only want to
| host Free software. There are any number of other tools
| catering to businesses.
| dismalaf wrote:
| It was a reply to the comment. My original comment merely
| stated the fact and that I use something else.
|
| I'm saying vague promises are worthless, not the service
| if you do 100% FOSS.
| bena wrote:
| That would be it. It's why I started with BitBucket. Because
| Github didn't allow for private repositories on the free tier
| at the time.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Wait really? is that the case, I didn't know that!
|
| I actually went and found the source as I wanted to ask you
| but I felt like HN police might come saying to give a google
| search so I am going to paste it here to save someone else a
| google search but also here is the main thing
|
| > Our mission is to support the creation and development of
| Free Software; therefore we only allow repos licensed under
| an OSI/FSF-approved license. For more details see Licensing
| article. However, we sometimes tolerate repositories that
| aren't perfectly licensed and focus on spreading awareness on
| the topic of improper FLOSS licensing and its issues.
|
| https://codeberg.org/magicfelix/Codeberg-
| Documentation/src/b...
|
| Funny thing is that I found this through by copying the
| statement from the hackernews comment and I was only able to
| find this through HN.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35480056
| clickety_clack wrote:
| Lock-in for compliance? There's a ton of integrations into
| things like Vanta.
| zhobbs wrote:
| conversely, what's the purpose of using Codeberg over Github?
| xigoi wrote:
| It's faster and FOSS.
| AlOwain wrote:
| I too would like to understand why. Perhaps the only one I
| care for is that I would not like to give too much power to
| Microsoft in choosing who can contribute.
|
| Others have issue with their code being used in AI training,
| but I find no issue in that myself, my code is not
| exclusively mine anyway and I have no say in how it is being
| used.
| jwildeboer wrote:
| No AI, EU based, so respects the GDPR for all users,
| regardless of where they live, you can send PRs to make it
| better, is 100% Free Software, has its own Actions system
| that is also 100% Free Software, the logo is nice, you can
| become a member of the Berlin based association and have a
| direct vote on policy/feature changes.
| yakattak wrote:
| For me so far the biggest thing holding me back is the lack of
| CI/CD.
| esafak wrote:
| What do you mean? https://docs.codeberg.org/ci/
| yakattak wrote:
| It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which
| is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions
| and it's a limited resource.
|
| I have several projects I'd want to move over but thats
| enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There's also
| Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is
| probably more expensive than GitHub.
| watermelon0 wrote:
| You can bring your own Woodpecker CI or Forgejo Actions
| runners. The cheapest solution is to just run them at home in
| a VM.
|
| Codeberg is a community driven project, which provides CI for
| FOSS projects, and it's a bit unfair to expect them to
| provide free compute for random and/or private projects.
|
| For what it's worth, I've had better experience with running
| self-hosted Forgejo Actions runners compared to self-hosted
| Github Actions runners.
| johannes1234321 wrote:
| "Everybody" is on GitHub. For Codeberg contributors, bug
| reporters, ... probably got to register first.
|
| Also: GitHub is so established that for many people git and
| GitHub are the same thing.
| datadrivenangel wrote:
| People calling git GitHub is one of my pet peeves.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > I always wonder what GitHub has that Codeberg doesn't.
|
| Aside from previously established dominance and associated
| network effects, a whole lot of individually little things
| which add up to a lot.
|
| > It's a shame this isn't as popular. It seems like developers,
| of all people, are willingly letting their code be AI
| piggybacked.
|
| So long as the AI firms operate under the assumption (and
| courts so far in the US at least seem inclined to favor this
| view) that training AI on copyright-protected material isn't
| infringement, any publicly-exposed code is going to be subject
| to AI piggybacking, not just code hosted on Github.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I had codeberg account before github account.
|
| I really created a github account to star other people's
| project and my keepassxc had got deleted by me messing around
| in my linux so I had lost access to my codeberg previous
| account and I think even my previous github account too but I
| went around to create a new github account but never a new
| codeberg account untill just recently (literally 1 hour ago
| lol)
|
| for me I could star a lot of projects and show support and
| there is even github donations. Its not as if I like github but
| I am giving my reasoning as to why I think the reason is that
| github won and codeberg hadn't.
|
| There are still a lot of people which use codeberg but a lack
| of awareness is also one part and the lack of people on
| codeberg. To me, like, I thought that if my project is on
| codeberg then it would get less stars (I was really chasing
| stars back then lol) and it would get less visibility and less
| people contributing and so on I think...
|
| Doesn't also help when you need a github account anyways to
| contribute to a git project in the sense that you ask them an
| issue.
|
| IIRC I wanted to ask a github issue on some project and that's
| why I had created my original account but then started hosting
| some code between codeberg and github from exclusively codeberg
| to then all code on github...
|
| Now I am starting to take back on that by hosting things on
| codeberg again from a fresh account.
| max_ wrote:
| Codeberg suffers from the same problem as sourcehut.
|
| They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use them.
|
| Sourcehut for example is hostile towards cryptocurrency related
| projects.
|
| Coderberg is hostile towards private repos.
| daneel_w wrote:
| > "They are so fanatical that many groups are unable to use
| them."
|
| I had open-sourced stuff there licensed under Creative
| Commons, which was forcibly removed. They do spell the
| license requirements out in their terms, I just can't wrap my
| head around the obstinacy. Calling it unhelpful do-goodery
| would be flattering. Fanatical is indeed the right word.
| eesmith wrote:
| Where you see a problem, I see a market niche.
|
| I pay for Sourcehut hosting. I like that I'm on a system
| which rejects cryptocurrency projects.
| jasonvorhe wrote:
| so on OSS bitcoin wallet (web, android, iOS, whatever)
| would be something you'd reject? why?
| eesmith wrote:
| Since we are talking about SourceHut, I'll simply say I
| agree with the views its founder wrote in "Cryptocurrency
| is an abject disaster" at
| https://drewdevault.com/2021/04/26/Cryptocurrency-is-a-
| disas...
|
| See also the 248 comments at
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26943408 from when
| that came out 4 years ago.
|
| Or in pop culture terms, I would reject a FOSS version of
| the Torment Nexus too.
| type0 wrote:
| > Coderberg is hostile towards private repos
|
| Get real. It's a community project with limited resources. If
| they had the money for hosting I'm sure that would be offered
| for FOSS projects, which their bylaws requires to focus on.
| daneel_w wrote:
| GitHub doesn't make your choice of content license their
| business.
| Arnavion wrote:
| If I was sufficiently motivated to leave GH for such idealistic
| reasons, it wouldn't be worth moving to another third-party
| host. That just means a few years later there will be some new
| idealistic reason to leave the new host, and I'll have to make
| the effort of switching all over again. If I ever leave GH,
| it'll be to self-hosting.
| fritzo wrote:
| You're missing the point. We _want_ AI to piggyback on our open
| source code, because then thousands of developers around the
| world can piggyback on that AI. That AI is a boon for users,
| and is just as useful as documentation and a discussion forum.
| jhsdgh876425 wrote:
| Why would any adult give so much power to a few people over
| their project for what would be a few $$ at most in GitHub if
| not free.
|
| The idea that I would choose a company because is from Europe
| instead of America, is kinda insane to be honest, I'm from
| Spain, Europe and my only peeve with products from America is
| that sometimes the cost to send products here is a bit too much
| for products like kinesis, aeron, books from nostarch, etc.
|
| Good for Codeberg for giving the hosting service for free to
| FOSS projects, but there is no way I'm giving so much power to
| a few volunteers over my projects.
|
| I wish GitHub would implement a feature to hide/private the
| projects I follow/star, that's the only thing I miss in GitHub.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Nice, now we can centralize the decentralized version control on
| a different website. <eyeroll>
| klimperfix wrote:
| Actually, they want to implement federation using forgefed [1]
| into forgejo, the underlying software.
|
| [1] https://forgefed.org/
| ffsm8 wrote:
| Mmh, that link is dead
| mariusor wrote:
| In an ironic turn of events the main repo is on github:
| https://github.com/forgefed/forgefed (and even without any
| mirrors on codeberg). :)
| commoner wrote:
| No, the main ForgeFed repo is on Codeberg:
|
| https://codeberg.org/ForgeFed/ForgeFed
|
| The README in both repos links to the main Codeberg repo
| and says that the GitHub repo is a mirror.
| mariusor wrote:
| Maybe you're eagerness to sing praises to the forgefed
| project overshadowed the common knowledge that git is already
| distributed but, git is already distributed. :P I think
| that's what parent was sarcastically trying to imply.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Do we know the project which is the 300k project as I was making
| a pages and even a video on how to make codeberg pages about an
| hour ago and this post is 41 minutes ago and I would be mad in
| joy lol
| enkrs wrote:
| I'm wondering, now almost three years in after the Forgejo/Gitea
| fork, which side of the fork ended up better. Both still seem
| very active with thousands of commits each.
|
| I run a Gitea server (since long before the fork, constantly
| updated) that handles issues, pull requests, signed commits,
| CI/CD, actions, and even serves my containers and packages. It's
| been amazing.
|
| Of course Forgejo can do the same. For those who've followed both
| projects closely -- which fork would you say has come out ahead?
| Codeberg being Forgejo's SaaS offering likely gives them more
| resources, but I also wonder if that means their priorities lean
| more toward SaaS than self-hosting.
| kstrauser wrote:
| When I checked a couple months ago, Forgejo was getting quite a
| bit more developer activity, which makes sense to me given the
| reason for the split: https://honeypot.net/2025/05/14/gitea-vs-
| forgejo-development...
| homebrewer wrote:
| > their priorities lean more toward SaaS than self-hosting
|
| It was FUD when the fork was announced, it is FUD now. Look at
| commercial images and what differentiates them from MIT -- it's
| pretty much just SAML and not much else. Their actual
| development policy is "you pay us for the feature you need --
| we build it under MIT and ship for everyone"; their
| collaboration with Blender is the most prominent example of
| this that I know of.
|
| I've also been wondering whether to jump ship, and have been
| going by comparing release notes -- how many features were
| shipped within the same period of time, which bugs were fixed,
| etc. I've seen no reason to migrate, Gitea continues to advance
| faster, even though Forgejo copies some of their commits that
| still apply relatively easily.
|
| Forget about commit counts, issues closed, and other artificial
| metrics -- they're significantly inflated on Forgejo's side by
| heavy use of bots (like bumping dependencies) and merge commits
| (which Gitea development process doesn't use). Look at release
| notes.
| pityJuke wrote:
| How is Gogs, the original project doing these days?
| blibble wrote:
| codeberg is great
|
| the interface is far more responsive, despite each click loading
| a new page (vs. the disaster than is react)
|
| and it is run by a charity, so it will never enshittify
|
| which GitHub is doing more and more with each passing day (no I
| don't want your shit "AI", not now, not ever)
| bix6 wrote:
| Can I push my code here and have it deploy to Cloudflare?
| Currently using GitHub but I'd switch.
| ge96 wrote:
| I remember when private repos cost $7/mo before they were free on
| GitHub
| iamdamian wrote:
| I self-host forgejo but still want a way to publish open-source.
| I've been using GitHub for this and didn't realize that
| codeberg.org was an option. Glad to see them getting the press.
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