Something else worth mentioning for the record, was that 'they' were openly talking on voat about "baking" webm's with tracking built-in. Webms were relatively new at the time, so I already didn't trust them, so I didn't think much about the comment at the time, happily assuming webms were designed to be trackable, as all new tech suck ass these days.

Nope, turned out they were using exploits. So either they were feds dumb enough to openly talk about their fuckery... or something else. Most hackers are faggots these days, that's how you stay out of jail as a hacker: you signal as loadly and publicly as possible that you uphold all the "current-thing"s, eg, animie-furry-profile pic, ukraine, nato, lgbt flags in your profile, etc. Anyone brave enough to be hacking from underneath a dissident profile is either a fed, or fed-adjacent, aware of it or not.