It’s not federated but there is pixelcanvas.io, which is like r/place but infinite and not controlled by Reddit

Ah I remember watching him years ago, good to know he’s still around. Although it looks like he does more internet drama videos rather than real-world news

Probably by just looking at the IP address, either due to the IP addresses of the VPNs being public or by the fact that many users are accessing the service through a single IP address

I don’t think this is really surprising, I’m sure many people went on it just to check it out when they heard it released. What would be interesting is to see how these stats compare to comparable services after their releases