We all love freedom, yet we don’t always want it for others — and we rarely stop to think about that. We probably should. Three years ago, SourceHut — a platform dedicated to free software hosting — issued a bold statement: software related to crypto and blockchains was no longer welcome there. The argument was that it brings nothing to the world but scams and environmental damage.
The admins at Codeberg liked the idea of a ban, too. A surprisingly large number of people popped up in the discussion to voice enthusiastic support — drooling with glee from behind the masks of "enlightened" types pretending to be reasonable, "we’re-all-human" folks. Yet, once a more diverse group of people actually showed up to discuss the matter, the thread was shut down, and the decision was made behind closed doors.
Meanwhile, everyone conveniently ignored even the highly upvoted posts from dissenters pointing out that fiat money causes even greater environmental harm than crypto. Electricity for banks, the mining of metals, and the production of cotton and paper for coins and banknotes have always damaged the planet, yet none of the initiative’s proponents moved to ban other financial software.
At the same time, the ban swept up an entire category of AI-related code along with the crypto stuff. Sure, everyone is tired of the cryptobros and vibe coders, not to mention the scammers. But does that mean a program built for just a handful of people that no one else wanted to create — has no right to exist? Or that Monero's privacy is useful only to criminals?
"Well, go host your code somewhere else," people might say — and they’d be right. But that doesn't mean these platforms can simply go on claiming to be bastions of freedom after suppressing small communities. Free Software is not the same thing as Open Source. The former encompasses the latter; beyond mere code accessibility, Free Software also champions user freedom. Compared to such petty hosting providers, even the capitalist GitHub looks better.
If someone wants to develop crypto— hell, even using AI — that is their right. But explaining to them that AI produce buggy code, or requiring an "AI-generated" tag on the project, is more complex than simply banning all such projects outright. And the talk about crypto-related crime is laughable, considering the US dollar is the currency most frequently used for money laundering.
Besides, 8.3% of all websites on the internet are scams. Let’s follow that logic to its conclusion and ban all HTML code — meaning every website in existence. After all, there are scams there, objectively, quite a lot of them. And the anarchist Satoshi Nakamoto obviously created his sophisticated coin solely to liberate scammers, right? What other reason could there be? Who else would you work for? A top-tier audience, something to be proud of.
Beyond the capitalists who manipulate the crypto market and use it to bypass sanctions, there are people just like us — people who don't want to pay taxes the state sticking its nose into their wallets. For some, it’s literally a lifesaver. Plus, you can run an AI on your own hardware without relying on the datacenter-hosted web chats that are collecting our data and damaging our planet.
The conclusion is simple: host it yourself (using something like Forgejo), but with a caveat: if you ever want others to use your service (and I’m sure you want to help your fellow human beings), remember that while they all have their own opinions, they might not have their own hosting. You might well be their only hope for creating something.
Don't strip others of their freedom unless you want the same fate for yourself in the future. We can protect our own freedom only by protecting the freedom of another person, as Clarence Darrow have said. This is not even altruism — it is, in fact, can be a pure self-interest. Consider even the level of basic biology: animals that cooperate survive longer than those that compete.