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.
Considering that git already support email based collaboration, I agree that a federated forge is really niche. It’s more of a frontend bonus. Which, considering the amount of company still using IRC, is not really a priority in the commercial world.