I think my advice is more of a general one. Imho the Achilles Heel of forgefriends is on productization, community-building and advocacy. Everyone - when they first hear about the idea and concept - is very excited. As they should be, because the concept ‘kicks the lama’s ass’. Yet generally they don’t come on board. These things need a lot of time, attention and effort, and it is all non-coding work mostly.
Am afraid I have to mention the ‘PR + marketing’ words again, that you so hate 
But it is a “Use the Force, Luke” good kind of activity in this context.
If I look at the post title “Proposal to setup a monthly report and meeting about forge federation…”, that is a bit… umm, not exciting. And in the text “The Gitea community is also interested in creating federated forges and this led to a few areas where both forgefriends and Gitea worked together…” there’s modesty, but missed marketing opportunity.
Is it really true that Gitea and forgefriends came to federation independently? And I mean acting on it, not with some issues in the tracker. No, I think the fact that strides were made are entirely due to the efforts that you and @pilou put in and the money you graciously set aside.
Think about the importance for Gitea. A forge feature that no other forge has and delivers a ton of value to the Gitea project! It is an absolute Unique Selling Point that allows knitting all those solitary gitea island that exist everywhere - unseen or forgotten - together.
So forgefriends is not a commercial DAPSI participant, so you don’t need to focus on product/market fit and all that jazz. But in this second stage you could dedicate to focus on materializing the value for the commons. What I would do wrt getting this up and running is:
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“Sell” the vision of forgefriends. Why people should be rocking back and forth on their seat in excitement.
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Approach the Gitea team, the full team and seriously ask the questions:
- How do you see the importance of the vision? And elaborate it further.
- How committed are you to bring all this about in best ways possible?
- How do we move forward so that we can benefit off each other’s strengths?
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And Codeberg can play a role here too. I see them more as the people-oriented organization whereas Gitea are the ‘tech center’.
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Turn “forge friends” into a real concept and a campaign that is used to rally the community, attract people.
- Make it exciting, accessible, attractive to join, facilitate onboarding, etc.
- And ask Gitea and Codeberg if they want to be intricate part of forgefriends in this construct.
BTW, the first meetup I would make a general webinar aimed at informing the broader public about what forgefriends and gitea are working on, with the purpose of giving the people a jolt and a boost and hand them a call to action that is irresistable 