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 would not do any work for Gitlab nor run any software on Gitlab due to how poor they are doing at software security. https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/05/0-click-gitlab-hijacking-flaw-under-active-exploit-with-thousands-still-unpatched/
Also while trying to look that up there’s a another one that is making the news from just the last couple of days? https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/gitlab-warns-of-critical-bug-that-lets-attackers-run-pipelines-as-an-arbitrary-user/
Good luck to anyone attempting to federate on top of a foundation like that.
I interviewed for them once, got rejected because I didn’t know some tiny corner of ruby on rails syntax despite working on it for 3 years. Huge bullet dodged…