I can’t help but notice most (all I’ve seen anyway) of the federated projects are hosted on GitHub. GitLab is also not federated, but can be self hosted and has at least discussed it.
I am fully aware of my bias for GitLab over GitHub, but I still wonder why is those things? Is there a federated source hosting project?
You’d still have a complete copy of the current HEAD, you’d just be missing a bunch of history depending on the depth at which you cloned.