Effort? Did you see his little DDOS scripts? I assure you, no effort was put into that, just rage and spit. If the rest of his project was given the same treatment, the world has suffered no great loss.
It's kind of dependent on the fedi software. On kbin, his posts aggregate into crossposts perfectly fine, but if I'm subscribed to each community he posted in, I still see them all separately in my thread list. I don't think he did anything intentionally, it's just how the cookie crumbled.
This is a major blind spot to the fediverse and it was easily exploited several years ago, when a disgruntled hacker made a bunch of accounts on unsecured misskey instances and used them to spam the whole network via federation. People tried to defederate from the instances, but the attacker eventually started spinning up his own. All he needed was to ensure at least one user on another instance would see his new instances.
Russia and other NSA's could easily use the same strategy: no effective countermeasure was developed, the attacker simply got bored and stopped.
My phone doesn't have any custom ROM support yet, so I guess I'm screwed? I love F-Droid, but this missive amounts to just ragebait for people who don't have Pixel devices.
He did not accomplish that by himself. The entire Republican party is responsible for that. The megadonors, the evangelicals, Fox News, the NRA, Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, internet trolls, manosphere podcasters, all the way down to the lifelong down-ballot voters.
The Donald Trump that Trump voters see is not the same one you and I see, because theirs is nearly entirely fabricated from lies and omissions. They see fake successes and don't see real failures. Trump's benefactors, not Trump, constructed this alternate reality. And those voters have been living in this constructed reality for over a decade now, conditioned to protect it against all outside forces.
You're right, it's not just the idiocy of the country that put him there, but the evil of the conservative machine.
While I am nostalgic for those days, they were also marred by the ilk of DRM like SecuROM. We discovered my disc drive was literally scratching our discs - the longer we played them, the more they deteriorated until the drive could no longer detect the disc. We purchased a new drive and still had to buy some of our games a second time. Paying twice for the same object was so abhorrent to me as a kid, that if I ever somehow lost access to a digital piece of media I had purchased, I'd just go sailing instead.
Effort? Did you see his little DDOS scripts? I assure you, no effort was put into that, just rage and spit. If the rest of his project was given the same treatment, the world has suffered no great loss.