Giving 'Free Publicity' to the People You Hate and Attack
Attack a person often enough or attack a project hard enough, then people who never hear of either will recognise and maybe pay attention to them. That seems to be the lesson learned from efforts to downplay a mediocre distro, which not many people would bother trying (if social control media didn't obsess over it for political reasons). Now it's downloaded a lot and Clownflare is distributing it. Quoting the project: "This would surely have taken Omarchy down in another age. Sent us scrambling for mirrors or torrents (and thinking about needing another mortgage on the house to pay the hosting bill). But we didn’t need to. That’s because Cloudflare sits in front of all of it: the ISOs, the Omarchy packages, and our Arch mirror. It’s all on R2 and behind their CDN. Neither of which of course ever broke a sweat. And that’s the reason a hundred thousand people had a fast, boring, uneventful download from anywhere in the world in the past week. Thank you to everyone at Cloudflare, and to Matthew Prince in particular. Matthew is also one of the Founding Patrons, which means he’s backing this project with both the infrastructure and his own money. Muchas gracias, señor!"
Seems like free press is the result of the political wrestling. There has been a lot of coverage lately [1, 2, 3] and not much of it is negative.
When really bad people that lots of people detest (e.g. Drew DeVault and Miguel de Icaza) say "don't do it", then lots of people will do it out of spite. Contrarians are common among GNU/Linux users.
Be careful what you wish for in social control media. █