I was one of the members who was a part of the initial grant for federation in Gitea, but sadly due to illness and other similar neither I nor my teammate were able to work on the grant (so no funding ended up being released), however the work we did start was completed, and we have continued to work on foundations since. Since spam/moderation/limitations are so significant we are focused on that portion first, since we don't want to open up another vector for it without having at least the minimum of protections in place. We have also been extremely fortunate to have experienced developers who do work on existing federated software share so much of their time, expertise, and experiences with us to help shape our work.