You are right about the word "federal". It is a confusing overlap in language. When people say "federal government", they mean a massive central power that rules over smaller states. But when anarchists or network engineers say "federation", we just mean independent groups choosing to work together on equal footing. Think of an association of independent trade unions or a farmer's market, not a capital city dictating laws to the provinces. Nobody is in charge of anyone else, they simply agree to cooperate on shared goals.

Regarding the delegates, you have identified the trade-off. Yes, sending people back and forth to build consensus is slower than having a boss just issue a command. It is absolutely less efficient. But that inefficiency is intentional. A dictatorship or a corporate hierarchy is incredibly fast, but if the leader makes a catastrophic mistake, everyone suffers instantly. Horizontal organisation trades speed for safety. The back-and-forth ensures that no single bad actor or corrupted delegate can force a terrible decision onto a community that does not consent to it.

As for enforcement and violations, you have to stop thinking about justice as a system of prisons and police officers. If a person or a group violates a shared agreement, the response is not to send armed men to lock them in a cage. The response is exclusion. The community simply cuts them off. They lose access to the shared resources, the logistics, and the mutual aid of the group. In a society where survival depends on cooperation, being exiled from the cooperative network is a severe and effective deterrent.

For physical defence against violent external threats, communities rely on local, volunteer militias. Instead of a standing army waiting for orders from a president, each local area maintains its own ability to defend itself. If a massive threat appears, these local defence groups coordinate with each other voluntarily, much like how a body's immune system responds to an infection. It is decentralised self-defence, built from the ground up, ensuring the people holding the weapons are the exact same people who live in the community they are defending.