A month isn’t very long, they haven’t even figured out their basic features - this was more a “maybe later this year” timeframe. It could be done quickly if they decided to start by reproducing mastodon and going from there, but building something that federates but is highly monetizable takes time - honestly they were probably pleased by the numbers and decided to go for monetization first
Making it clear they are unwelcome was the point though.
It seems they’ve put the idea on the back burner after we largely made our position clear, but it’s not unlikely that they try to quietly federate down the road… Every time they think about it, we have to make them believe this would be more trouble than it’s worth