How would that (legally and technically) work exactly? And how would you defend even the hacks themselves against DMCA?

The lines of code that were generated are copyrighted by the person who wrote them, so they probably can't be DMCA'd easily. The offsets (and possibly the algorithm for finding those offsets) are harder to protect, of course.

The problem, of course, is that bogus DMCA claims are enough to take down a repository, and protesting those DMCA claims will dox you to the big tech companies.

Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.

> Every time a project like this goes down, I feel more like there should be some kind of Gitea server hosted on a hidden service where "illegal" projects like these can be developed.

While not a Gitea server per se (GitLab instead), git.rip used to be a well-known host for pirated content, leaked source code, and various other things. If I remember correctly, the amount of content on there was in the hundreds of terabytes, which would have made it very hard to externally archive (not even taking into account bandwidth restrictions).

The ROM hack community has been releasing patches to proprietary software for years without legal issues.

Just upload the thing to a Russian server.

Good way to get a bunch of lawyers at your door

And distributing a premade APK is somehow not a Good way to get a bunch of lawyers at your door?