I stopped paying for sourcehut because his opinions are relevant here since he bans types of projects based on them. You never know when another restriction will be added.
If you're talking about banning cryptocurrency and blockchain projects, personally that earned some favor in my eyes. I'm happy to use and pay for a service that doesn't contribute to that blight.
I also do not like "crypto", but I do not think this type of restriction is great on a paid service. Maybe, maybe it could be argued for public repositories. Or if it was free. But like, why does Drew DeVault care that I would have a private repository with "explicit sexual content"? On an account I pay for?
And even if you agree with the current set of restrictions, are you sure it will not be further expanded? I am not.
Having dealt with this in the past, once you let cryptocurrency people onto a service they will stop at nothing to abuse shared resources for whatever mining fad is currently underway. As an operator, you can either hire staff for a full-time whack-a-mole game, get into arguments with customers about whether what they're doing is shitty even though it meets some pedantic interpretation of policy, or just ban the whole crowd and focus on customers who don't suck.
As for banning sex content on a paid service, you'll find it's more common than you think, since payment processors tend to drop customers who permit that sort of thing. Porn-enabled services have chargeback and failed-charge rates orders of magnitude higher than services which forbid them.
There are a ton of reason to fire a client. The two mentioned here are completely uncontroversial from a business standpoint.
"We do not allow content or activity on GitHub that: ... is sexually obscene or relates to sexual exploitation or abuse, including of minors".
Atlassian's AUP at https://www.atlassian.com/legal/acceptable-use-policy says "Inappropriate content" includes "Posting, uploading, sharing, submitting, or otherwise providing content that ... Is deceptive, fraudulent, illegal, obscene, defamatory, libelous, threatening, harmful to minors, pornographic (including child pornography, which we will remove and report to law enforcement, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children), indecent, harassing, hateful"?
GitLab's AUP at https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/legal/acceptable-use-po... says "unacceptable use of our services [which] applies to all users of all GitLab services including those on the Free, Premium, and Ultimate GitLab tiers" mean "you must not: Create, upload, submit, execute, transmit, or host anything that ... is vulgar, obscene, or pornographic, or gratuitously depicts or glorifies violence."
Now, there are differences between "explicit sexual content", "sexually obscene" and "pornographic", but if you are worried about possible further expansion, you shouldn't use any of these code hosting services.
I was conjecturing it was the same reason as the other hosting providers, not saying that was the same or that I had special insight.
Instead, I was pointing out that since all the providers I looked at have essentially the same restriction, you likely shouldn't use any of them. Certainly there are a lot of people who use GitHub despite having no guarantee the ToS won't be more restrictive in the future.
Sourcehut's ToS is certainly not exceptional in that regard, so really you are objecting to essentially every 3rd party code hosting provider, yes?
Or is there one you had in mind where you aren't concerned about further expansion?
It's hard to find a payment processor for pornographic providers. Existing payment processors are likely to stop supporting you if you become a porn provider. Additionally, there are branding risks in being associated with adult content. There's also more legal scrutiny involved, and it's outright illegal in some jurisdictions.
A simple Google search on the topic should be educational.
I like when people bring their values when they do business. Especially when those values are more than “make money”, and expressed in more ways than product design.
You know, it's fair not to support the service on that principle,
However, Sourcehut is actually FOSS software.
IE: if you wanted to run one of their banned things, you could, just on your own hardware.
It's fine, in my opinion, to moderate your services if people have an escape hatch to get out of your service if you require them to move along.
This is a far cry from services such as GitHub, or even Gitlab (with their open core) as transferring to your own system is actually possible, though not without some relative pain.
I don't like crypto projects, so of course I am biased here. But if you like free speech then there's not many options and I think sr.ht is the best one (especially if you plan to self-host).
GitHub is well known to be controlling of speech and even championed some measures that affected the entire industry, and as others have mentioned they have restricted projects on a relatively arbitrary basis. Sometimes even due to geographic region.
All services have permissible use clause in their terms & conditions. And if this is about cryptocurrencies and blockchain. It's absolutely a valid choice for a small service provider to block them. They are resource hungry and resource abusive. A small provider like SourceHut can't afford to take that unnecessary stress. VC funded or big players can. And they do that for easy, quick & short boost in money or marketing PR.
Also, I always have observed this. This reminds me. Not targeted at gray_-_wolf but a general observation which I just remembered...
There is a trend where people attack small actors/entities for smaller mistakes or opinions. But give free card to big players you cannot touch for atrocious BS. Because they are monopolies or filty rich.
Especially in tech, you don't talk shit about google or ms a lot publicly. Cos that makes you less hirable.
