Voat had a behind the scenes "angel investor" which was heavily rumored to be PIA. The deal was they get the Voat source code in exchange for paying the operating expenses (which were stupid high because Putt never migrated away from Azure hosting). Then PIA gets bought out by some israel company or they always were run by israelis and they renege on the offer to pay hosting costs. Supposedly Putt paid out of pocket for 6 months then shut the site down. There was no chance of migrating the site as the israelis owned the source code though I don't know why Putt didn't just give the code away considering they bailed on the contract. I would assume that would make it null and void but you know how "lawyers" work.

I may have some the details wrong but that's the jist of it.

There are settings which you can't change. In services for example, you will find ones which you can't change, and then there are ones that are hidden.

It's not that easy, it's closed source code. The fact that you can pirate Windows is because Microsoft allows it, they could easily code in a billion online-checks to check if it's legit or not. (((They))) want you to use their spyware OS rather then use an open source OS like GNU/Linux where you practically have total control over your OS.