> If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage), and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups, we might get unhappy about that.
Emphasis mine. This isn't about if it's technically possible (it certainly is), it's whether or not it's allowed by their platform policies.
Their page publishing feature seems more like it's meant for projects and organizations rather than individual people. The way it's described here indicates that using them to host your own blog/portfolio/what have you is considered to be abusing their services.
All it shows the world is why there needs to be a VAT like tax against US digital services to help drive a public option for developers.
There's no reason why the people can't make our own solutions rather than be confined to abusive private US tech platforms.
A better alternative would be to create the incentives so that companies like these can be born in Europe.
My 2 cents.
Keep in mind, I'm not saying Codeberg is bad, but it's terms of use are pretty clear in the sense that they only really want FOSS and anyone who has something other than FOSS better look elsewhere. GitHub allowed you to basically put up anything that's "yours" and the license wasn't really their concern - that isn't the case with Codeberg. It's not about price or anything either; it'd be fine if the offer was "either give us 5$ for the privilege of private repositories or only publish and contribute public FOSS code" - I'm fine paying cash for that if need be.
One of the big draws of GitHub (and what got me to properly learn git) back in the day with GitHub Pages in particular was "I can write an HTML page, do a git push and anyone can see it". Then you throw on top an SSG (GitHub had out of the box support for Jekyll, but back then you could rig Travis CI up for other page generators if you knew what you were doing), and with a bit of technical knowledge, anyone could host a blog without the full on server stack. Codeberg cannot provide that sort of experience with their current terms of service.
Even sourcehut has, from what I can tell, a more lenient approach to what they provide (and the only reason why I wouldn't recommend sourcehut as a GitHub replacement is because git-by-email isn't really workable for most people anymore). They encourage FOSS licensing, but from what I can tell don't force it in their platform policies. (The only thing they openly ban is cryptocurrency related projects, which seems fair because cryptocurrency is pretty much always associated with platform abuse.)
I mean, it is arguably much easier to just write the HTML page and upload it with FTP and everyone can see it. I never understood why github became a popular place to host your site in the first place.
1) Passive mode. What is it and why do I need it? Well, you see, back in the old days, .... It took way too long for this critical "option" to become well supported and used by default.
2) Text mode. No, I don't want you to corrupt some of my files based on half-baked heuristics about what is and isn't a text file, and it doesn't make any sense to rewrite line endings anymore anyway.
3) Transport security. FTPS should have become the standard decades ago, but it still isn't to this day. If you want to actually transfer files using an FTP-like interface today, you use SFTP, which is a totally different protocol built on SSH.
Easy: it was free, it was accessible to people that couldn't spend money for a hosting provider (read: high schoolers) and didn't impose arbitrary restrictions on what you were hosting.
Back then, your options as a high school student were basically to either try and reskin a closed off platform as much as you could (Tumblr could do that, but GitHub Pages also released in the time period where platforms were cracking down on all user customization larger than "what is my avatar") or to accept that the site you wanted to publish your stuff on could disappear at any moment the sketchy hosting provider that provided you a small amount of storage determined your bandwidth costs meant upselling you on the premium plan.
GitHub didn't impose those restrictions in exchange for being a bit less interactive when it came to publishing things (so no such thing as a comment section without using Disqus or something like that, and chances are you didn't need the comments anyways so win-win) That's why it got a lot more popular than just using an FTP server.
And if you already knew how to write/make HTML you'd for sure already know all of that too.
I don't always have a server available to host an HTTP+FTP server on. Or want to pay for one, or spend time setting one up. I can trust that Github Pages will have reasonable uptime, and I won't have to monitor it at all.
> And if you already knew how to write/make HTML you'd for sure already know all of that too.
This seems unnecessarily aggressive, and I don't really understand where it's coming from.
BTW, you can absolutely host plain HTML with Github Pages. No SSG required.
That's a completely false statement. My kid took very basic programming classes in school which covered HTML so they could build webpages, which is a fantastic instant-results method. Hooray, now the class is finished, he wants to put it on the web. Just like millions of other kids who couldn't even spell FTP.