Open source non-profit platform Codeberg "suffering from hate campaigns due to far-right forces"

Codeberg are a "non-profit, community-led effort that provides Git hosting and other services for free and open source projects" and they've recently had a major problem from what they say are far-right forces engaging in a hate campaign.

Entering my email early on Wednesday morning was something that made me raise my eyebrows. I get a lot of emails, often from various projects I'm tracking across various instances of Git. This one definitely wasn't normal though, coming from a repository on Codeberg named "truth" from a user "truth". The issue subject line from the email I won't repeat, but it was clear racial hatred. Inside the email the issue had a whole bunch of people tagged, myself included.

Later that afternoon, an official email from Codeberg came in to apologise and linked to their announcement blog post.

Codeberg say they're "currently suffering from hate campaigns due to far-right forces, and so are our users", with the target being "several projects advocating tolerance and equal rights" that have been subjected to "hate attacks, such as massive spam of abusive messages in their issue trackers". The attackers took advantage of Codeberg's notification system, that enabled people to create a repository, make an issue and then tag anyone in it notifying them generating an email.

According to Codeberg they have "blocked access to the used functionality and deleted the user accounts" but "they managed to generate a large amount of notification emails already".

Thankfully this hasn't deterred Codeberg from their mostly volunteer-led mission. And they end the announcement with a note about how they will "not be discouraged in our fight against far-right ideologies". They've also been working on securing funding from NLnet for more moderation tooling.

I'll take this moment to remind people that I, and GamingOnLinux, take a very firm stance against any kind of hatred. It won't stand in the comments, and I won't put up with it in any attached community like our Discord. It's a real shame the lengths some people will go to when spreading hate.