The external developer who started the work and was highly praised by Gitlab offered to work for them if they made a team around federation --> nothing.
A group of French universities are now considering making a group in order to work on it themselves and contribute back to Gitlab.
Gitlab will most likely use it as a big selling point once all the work has been done by externals with little to no cost to Gitlab.
I host/manage it in my workplace. Only for groups, repositories, and merge requests with reviews. It’s super bloated for such a [simple] use case. Every time I upgrade I especially see how loaded it is.
Their promotion is targeting a full-featureset devops and delivery pipeline with stats tracking and managed target environment.
Back then it was the better alternative to Phabricator, which we used before. We (I) may have chosen something different today.
I moved from GitLab last year, was a great decision for productivity