I’ve never worked with mediawiki, but if you’re looking for advice I’d recommend taking the time to figure docker out. Just about anything you want to self host is going to have a docker image for you, so it’s a time investment that will yield immediate and significant rewards.
I’m not a huge fan of network chuck, but if you need a getting started his videos are a pretty good jumping off point: https://youtu.be/eGz9DS-aIeY
I’ve been using DDG as a Google replacement for a 3-4 years now. I have to say that my experience in terms of search results has been the opposite of yours. Google’s ads were so prominent and the search results so lacking what I wanted to see, it has become totally useless to me. DDG on the other hand almost always shows me what I’m looking for in the first few results.
Having said that, I’ve been using DDG long enough that perhaps I’m just acclimated to its features and functionality.
I last looked at mastodon years ago, and got bored pretty quickly. It was a nice idea, but lacked…. Something. I came back as a Reddit refugee and found a hashtag for every occasion, a substantially expanded fediverse, and a couple of attempts to offer a Reddit like user experience.
I think that missing something was actually two things: 1. A forum where people can organize around moderated communities 2. (And more importantly) A critical mass of users to generate the content that satiates lurkers