Those people are completely missing the point in a way that is just funny.

The Arguments

I have read and have seen multiple arguments, so I’ll try to address the main ones:

“doing this will kill their business”

The answer to that is easy: Codeberg is not a “business”, it’s a non-profit organization that just does stuff for its members. Its members decided to ban AI, so that’s what they do. It’s democracy. The people who are mad about this literally are the problem in the world, Codeberg didn’t do that for any kind of business reason. They did that purely out of principle. This was purely a decision made out of moral principle, which for a lot of (mostly American) techbros is inexcusable, because they don’t understand how someone can make a moral decision (and stand by it) instead of following the money.

And again, this is an organization made to serve its members, so what external people think is irrelevant, they’re not members (and if they disagree, they should have been members).

“doing this isn’t efficient! It will make it so the developers using Codeberg are going to be left being”

The answer to that is: So? Not everyone cares about being the “best” or being “at the top”, some people just want to make stuff, to make stuff. It’s that simple. They don’t care if it’s not the most efficient way, and they don’t even disagree with the fact that it makes you more efficient, they disagree with it morally.

“doing this while saying it’s a fascist technology is doing fascism”

That one is kinda funny, because all the people I’ve read saying that are Americans, a country famous for “not doing fascism” (sarcasm).

A lot of people also took it personally by assuming they were called fascists… which is literally not what they said (though I guess them feeling targeted kinda says something).

But that’s not the point, the point is… they’re not forced to accept you. It’s their platform. It’s their decision. Don’t like it? Host your own or use the dozens of other platforms that welcome AI.

Conclusion

Codeberg has always been human-focused and mostly anti-capitalist. I mean, they even promoted and moved to “Forgejo” a protest-fork (that I disagreed with strongly) made because Gitea became a company (to sustain its development).

Point is: the only people who are surprised (like this guy) have discovered Codeberg a year or so ago (and he did). Codeberg has ALWAYS been morally/politically oriented. None of this is surprising.

In the end, having a reasonably big organization that stands by what they mean (and has a spine) is amazing (and I say that as someone who does use AI for some stuff - but not anything on this blog).

And it genuinely annoyed me.

I ended up having a discussion/rant about it, and this blog post is basically a summary of that.

For reference, I’ve been messing around with/learning about codecs and file formats for nearly 20 years, so my annoyance comes with reasons.

It’s Happening yet Again

For people not knowing exactly what AV2 is, I’ll try to explain it simply: AV2 is a video codec, a codec is basically a “format” / set of standards in which you store media.

Something stored using a specific codec can be played (decoded) or made (encoded) in 2 ways:

• Hardware accelerated (specific hardware coder/decoder for each format specializing in making it really efficient)
• In Software (take your CPU/GPU and just “bruteforce” it, which is highly inefficient and slow)

AV2 is an “enhancement” of AV1, and it’s a pointless codec that’s going to cause yet another environmental disaster.

AV1 was already kind of pointless, it’s VP9, but slightly better, slightly more compressed, while requiring far more CPU processing.

H.264 was the baseline that replaced all the really shitty ones like Xvid, MPEG2 and VC-1. Then came H265 which was basically a compressed version of H264 with the downside that low-bitrate files look bad. VP9 (VP8 was basically the same format, but it was replaced so quickly that it doesn’t really matter) was truly the last useful format, because it fixed the problem of H265 and low quality (albeit, with sometimes over-processing/over-shining).

A New Codec is More than a New Codec

Making a new codec means that to use it… you need to replace all your hardware.

It happened with the previous codecs already, and it took years. We don’t need another one.

We were fine with H.264 for a decade. Then we had H.265, which took ages to be adopted but was kinda a good thing (back when connections were slow), and then when things were almost fully set up for H.265, the industry almost instantly moved to VP8 and VP9, the adoption of them was faster but still took years.

Today, AV1 isn’t even adopted by the vast majority, and they are already publishing AV2. Like, don’t release your new format if it’s not good enough instead of making a new one every two years, and I wasn’t being hyperbolic when I said two years, it’s real: “AV2 development work started in 2020, two years after the release of AV1.”

Software Decoding is Not a Solution

People might reply to me that the solution is just software decoding, which, even if it’s slow, is usable. Sure, it’s usable on hardware that is actually overpowered, but on low-power devices, it’s unusable.

For example, I personally experienced the fact that AV1 at 2160p (4K) is barely usable on a high-end 2022 “low-power” device.

But It’s Optional… Right?

Some people might also say that “it’s optional, you don’t have to use it”.

Sure, it’s optional on principle. However, if you try to use YouTube today, you are basically forced to pick VP9 or AV1. Sure, you can technically choose to play an H.264… except Google destroyed their quality on purpose and made them so bit-starved that a supposed “1080p” looks worse than a DVD (not to mention the fact that 1080p is the highest quality they provide in H.264). 

Netflix has also done the same thing, albeit with lower bit-starving.

And spoiler for you: YouTube and Netflix are the main video sources for the vast majority of people.

The Point of This post

My point really is that they need to stick to a format for more than 10 years.

Give people time to actually have hardware to support it.

I know the people working on it are millionaire tech bros, but the vast majority of people aren’t, and even I, while being massively passionate about technology and media, only got my first device that could play AV1 last year and still have some devices that can’t.

Also, up until last year, one of my main devices couldn’t play 1080p VP9.

VP9 had barely started to be fully accepted and available when we moved to AV1. Now AV1 is barely available on anything that releases AV2. Like, if it’s not good enough, take your time.

All about Money

Obviously this is all about money, money talks and a new codec:

• make Google save storage/bandwidth for YouTube
• make Netflix save storage/bandwidth for their service
• push/force people to upgrade perfectly working stuff because technology/computers have plateaued

Forcing new codecs is basically Intel/Nvidia/ARM/AMD (and basically all the companies that sell hardware) way of making you (us) buy new hardware, and this is a way for Google/Netflix to save money.

CPUs have been good enough for almost everything for at least ten years. The only thing that got better realistically is power consumption, but outside of that, it’s only codecs pushing (forcing) people to upgrade.

An Environmental Disaster

Technology aside and buying your hardware aside, this is a massive environmental disaster. This is forcing people to upgrade perfectly working hardware just to play videos. This is all about making people spent more money on new hardware just to play videos. Hardware that ends up replacing the previous hardware, even though it was perfectly working. This creates a massive amount of e-waste for literally no reason other than corporations making money.

A Social Disaster

A lot of countries aren’t as rich as the first world, some people struggle to get even a reasonably good phone, they can’t get the best and greatest.

Forcing new codecs down everyone’s throat is just a way to keep having them behind.

Made by a Non-profit, Sure

Some people might reply to me “but AV2 is made for the greater good by a non-profit”, and to that I’d reply, look at the members’ list of said non-profit when I used Intel/Nvidia/ARM/AMD/Google/Netflix… I wasn’t using them randomly, they are core members and  they’re the ones pushing the “non-profit” to make something that makes all previous hardware unusable.

All these because that’s what you do when you are a big company that has money. You build a supposed non-profit and make a thing supposedly for the greater good that massively benefits you.

The fact that governments aren’t stepping in to manage standards is telling.

We truly are living in a corporatocracy and this is hell.

The Project

Trakt (the movies/shows tracker) has recently gone the enshitification route:

• Their new UI is awful: It’s missing specific views (like season view for TV shows), the list of your comments/reviews is gone, ratings are now out of 5… for reasons… seeing your watch history is now done 1 week at a time, you can’t rate seasons anymore… and so much more.
• People are complaining about it, but the staff isn’t listening (and actually banned a lot of people from their forums… and often from the actual website too)…
• It also removed features and became hostile to free users (then again, paid users also lost features, like automatic data export - and some of the banned people were paid users).
• This is probably the (second) worst UI redesign I ever saw. It feels (and surely is) vibe coded…

So I fixed the UI by only using them for scrobble and making my own UI from their data export, in pure markdown: https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/trakt-export-to-markdown

I didn’t want to depend on any plugins or anything that wasn’t portable - and I wanted the file to be human-readable even “un-rendered” - which is why I went this route instead of anything that depends on specific software.

AI Acknowledgement

This was made with the help of LLM, a lot of it was still “human” made.

The project was written and refined with two different LLM “AI” models: Claude Opus 4.6 and GPT-4.1 running in “GitHub Copilot Chat”.

I can’t personally write Python from scratch, but I made those LLM do exactly what I wanted, and then I tweaked a lot of it by hand. There was a LOT of back and forth, and a lot of “human” work, but this is, at its core still a project made using LLMs.

It took me more than 10+ hours of work (minimum).

This was for personal use first and foremost, I just decided to release it.

Consider this provided as is, as the LICENSE says.

AI sucks, but I’m not a developer, have no interest in becoming one, and I’m too poor to hire a contractor. Blame capitalism, not me.

My stance on AI

This blog post is fully written by a human (and so will any blog post I make), I do not use any kind of “AI” (spellchecker aside) for creative work.

My stance on AI is this:

• AI/LLMs have a lot of issues, mostly ethical ones (and resource usage ones in countries where things are mismanaged and/or nuclear power isn’t a thing), like the fact that they did use almost all the open-source projects that exist for training, effectively ignoring the licenses.

• I’m not personally for them, I do use them sometimes, but purely when I have no other choice… which is starting to happen more and more since search engines have become so bad.

• When doing scripts, they are useful purely as a way to syntax things (and in this case, for me to be able to do Python even though I don’t know Python: having the LLM output as a starting point meant I could just read the code and edit what it gave me to make it better).

If you want to read it, it’s available on https://wiki.thefrenchghosty.me/macos/delete-dsstore-files-automatically/

What does this mean for PussTheCat.org

In short, PussTheCat.org will remain as is… partially (see what’s next below). I started to fix longstanding “issues” of it recently (moving Rimgo to another server, updating/enhancing the homepage…) and it will continue (I also plan to deploy at least one more privacy frontend).

What’s next, and what does it matter for you?

I have had a plan in my head for more than a year now: this plan being to make a “PussTheCat.org on steroid” (I’m not sharing exact details on my plan yet).

This is now what I plan to do: I’ll open my own company (don’t worry, I don’t plan to turn it into a shit one), and go try to do this project.

Obviously, something like that won’t allow me to have a complete salary (unless hundreds of you decide to become a customer), but it’s a stepping stone toward being able to work full-time on what I want: IT stuff (except actually interesting), FOSS and anti-big-tech stuff.

I plan to spend at least 3-6 months full-time on it at the beginning.

Thank you

I’d like to thank, again, all the people who encouraged me and donated over the years, it means a lot to me.

Stay tuned! I love you all! <3

PS: to be clear, the PussTheCat.org ownership won’t be transferred to the company, it will remain completely independent - just with the same person behind it

Over the year I used 5 different registrars, I started with Namesilo (because of the cheap price), with OVH (because of the cheaper price on some TLD), then moved to Gandi (from Namesilo and OVH). I also used Namecheap (an awful registrar), Porkbun and Regery (because of the cheap price on one of the TLD I wanted on a domain I don’t use for now).

Gandi has been my main registrar for years for multiples reasons: great UI, great ethic, France-based company. The prices weren’t good, but what mattered to me was the rest (as long as my domain don’t cost me more than 20€/year each), the service was great and it was a good company.

However, something changed.

On February 2023, Gandi “merged” with Total Webhosting Solutions (TWS):

“On February 21st, 2023, Gandi.net and Total Webhosting Solutions (TWS) joined forces by announcing the creation of Your.Online, a European online service platform.”

The problem? It wasn’t a merger, it was an acquisition: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/total-webhosting-solutions/company_financials

When I discovered that, I asked someone I know (who knows more about tech business buyout than me) what this meant, they said that, companies often do an acquisition when merging, this simplifies the administrative burden since they don’t have to create a new legal entity (this makes sense). To check if it’s actually a merger, you have to check if the management of the absorbed company are managing the new entity. In Gandi’s case, none of the original Gandi’s managers are managing Your.Online (you can see the proof on their website), the Gandi’s managers are part of the Your.Online “Advisory Board”, which, as the name suggests, gives advice, and nothing more. This effectively means that it was a full on buyout.

Which mean that Gandi hid the reality as to appease users after they saw that a lot of people were angry about it.

I was basically acting in a “wait and see” phase, it could be bad, yes, but it could also be good.

The problem? The bad started:

• prices went up (by a lot, we’re talking ~10% of some TLD from an already expensive price)
• some stuff that were promised to customers were removed (free e-mail)

Now what?

After my discovery of the acquisition and multiple discussions with multiple people, I have decided to stop using Gandi permanently.

The search

I spent multiple hours planning my move, I started with my technical requirements (that are pretty low): I need a registrar that can support the TLDs of all the domains I own (something that’s easy since I use common TLD). This registrar has to register domains itself, and not be a reseller of someone else. It also needs to be in my country (France), or in a country that is: privacy-friendly, politically stable (at a minimum) and “rich”. This registrar has to be in Western Europe (but not in the UK because it’s a five eyes member).

Outside of this, my main criteria were good ethic and good customer support. I especially didn’t want a company that could trade ethics for profit (looking at you Gandi).

I started by checking the registrar of France, Germany and Switzerland, thanks to a website I discovered some months ago: DomainState.

I also quickly checked the registrar of the Netherlands and Norway, but didn’t really find anything more “go-to” registrars.

After this first overview, I decided to dig more into 2 registrars: Infomaniak and Netim to see if they could be good choices…

Digging more into Infomaniak

I started with Infomaniak; however, it was almost instantly disqualified for a single reason: they started less than a year ago to advertise on YouTube. I, personally, don’t want to use anything from a company that heavily advertise their service.

I still dug into it more just to be sure, and 2 things made me stop considering them:

• they have FAR too many services (a lot of them being really young) which tell me that they’re slowly but surely moving their focus away from domains.
• the domain names’ prices are too close to the registry price, it means that the margin is thin, which surely mean that, if they started advertising recently, the price might go up to make up for it.

All this tells me that, if Infomaniak is “good” today, it might not last long, since they will surely decide that they want more profit.

I’d rather not risk it, and decided not to choose them.

Digging more into Netim

I then started to dig into Netim, and was happy to see 2 things:

• they’re a small company (62 000 registered domains) that ACTUALLY focus on domain names (and they have been doing it for 19 years!).
• they actually reward people who dig into their company: a promo code is given on the about page to thank people for their interest in the company.

For those interested: they offer free e-mail (something Gandi stopped doing) and free 250 MB basic web hosting (something Gandi never did).

I read the contract/TOS, and it was all standard for a registrar, except for a strange (but acceptable) clause that says that the client agrees to allow Netim to cite them or their website in their marketing or promotion material.

I dug into the user reviews, and they were almost all good (most of the ones who were “bad” were made by customers who didn’t know how domain work and who blamed Netim).

The prices are higher than most, but still lower than Gandi, which means they are sustainable, which is good because it means that they have no reason to sell out.

Trying out Netim

After those researches I decided to try out Netim, I started by migrating 2 (unused) domains, I was really pleased by what I saw: the UI was great, and I honestly consider some part of it better than Gandi (a registrar that was known to have the best UI).

Some (rare) stuff needed to be done through their legacy UI, but the most important stuff could be done from the main UI (in my findings the only things that had to be done from their legacy UI is enabling/disabling registrar locking and generating the transfer code - basically something that you only do once, when you leave).

Some screenshots:

The only part that is sadly missing is “direct” DNS zone modification, something that isn’t available in most registry, but something that Gandi had.

Moving to Netim

I decided to move to Netim.

I started to move all my domains one by one, during my move I did try to move a domain that was transferred less than 2 months ago to another registrar (by ICANN policy), which meant that it couldn’t be transferred to Netim. I opened a support ticket at 22:00, and the next morning before 9:00 the domain was instantly refunded as credit (I was asked if I preferred a refund on my bank account) without any other questions asked. This is amazing to see.

Conclusion

Gandi became bad, but Netim is doing what Gandi was doing, except they’re still independent.

They’re a small but profitable company, which means you get a top-tier support.

This is rare to find a company that uses their good ethic and great support as their main marketing argument, so I’ll gladly enjoy it while it lasts!

Post-Scriptum

Before posting this blog post I wanted to get a Netim affiliate link, I did read the affiliate contract, and some clause were not-so-great, this is why I won’t give you any affiliate links. This contract won’t affect any “normal” user, so it’s not a problem.