tldr: chapo.chat isn't ready yet.
Don't worry, you'll get to be called libs by the users from lemmygrad.ml Soon™.
[chapo.chat is] running a heavily modified version of lemmy forked months ago, for not just the front end, but the back end as well. Once they’re up to date with the most recent lemmy versions that have federation working, then we can try federation, on the back end at least. Their back end devs are great, but their front end devs contribute nothing upstream, and will have to re-create all the federation-related parts of the lemmy-ui code for their own fork.
EDIT: See @Beatnik's comment
we stopped merging upstream for now when they split the frontend and backend. the entire file structure changed so there's that and a seriously large amount of merge conflicts. it's an incredibly large task, lol.
Software dev is my day job so I'm aware of just how much of a pain in the ass merge conflicts can be. I just figured I'd go for a low tech explanation so it's more accessible. I know you all put in an insane amount of work so we can call each other libs all day.
Any reason why the federation code was not separated from the rest of the codebase?
i assume it's because they're actively developing it and will probably split it out in the future.