@bouncepaw I'm not sure. I'm indeed not working on Gitea anymore, but I also did not intentionally make it difficult for Gitea to use my code.
For instance, the federation code is still licensed as MIT instead of switching to AGPL, and Forgejo is currently almost the exact same codebase, so it shouldn't be hard to port the federation code to Gitea.
Basically, whether Gitea gets federation depends on whether Gitea Ltd does anything dumb and if Gitea wants federation support.