Yup, federation can only work if the parts actually connect to one another. Isn’t Trump’s TruthSocial build on some federated protocol too? But if you connected your node to it, everybody else would shun you.
If I recall correctly, it was initially built on a relicensed version of Mastodon, with federation disabled. No idea what's going on with it now, or if it was even legal to do so with Mastodon's AGPL license.
I don't think it's even relicensed, they pretty much just stole the code as far as I'm aware. From what I've read (I can't even reach the service as a foreigner) it's not even built on a recent version of Mastodon.
