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.

Trump's twitter clone has disabled federation as far as I'm aware.

the single largest Mastodon instance is Japanese if I'm not mistaken, and overall it is significantly less US centric than Twitter. Among the top 15 I count about five Japanese ones, an Italian, French and German one and two dedicated to sex and tech workers. Substantially less US centric than mainstream media, including Twitter which bombards you with US politics even if you are like in my case, German.