This has likely happened because the german government created the social.bund.de instance earlier this year

The instance is almost 3.5 years old btw, which you can easily see from the instance admin account @[email protected]. It just wasn’t used by many government departments at the time, mostly the data protection agency and the BSI. The @[email protected] account itself is pretty old too. It dates back to before the whole Twitter debacle. I guess that’s also part of the reason why they decided to go full Mastodon, since they already have a lot of experiences with it.

It is federated though? It’s literally the first sentence in their specification: https://spec.matrix.org/latest/