As someone who self hosts things for fun i see no drawback to running my own instance and limiting it to a hand full of people i know. The hardware requirements for a small server are minimal enough most any older laptops laying around could likely handle it. Yes, i can only see communities i’ve interacted with and you could argue that limits my experience but i’ll argue that out allows me to tailor my experiences to my tastes. There are plenty of search options and auto populating softwares that my feed is plenty full enough as is.

I didn’t use the Ansible playbook but the docker compse I used my first go around was pulling an old image. Have you verified you’re running the newest image?

I’ve had success running mine on docker but i’ve been messing around with docker for a while now so i’m familiar with it. I googled a tutorial that specified what parameters in the config file that needed to be my domain and did the rest on my own. The tutorial was as detailed as to included the commands to make the correct folders and change their permissions. If you have access to a linux machine that may be a better route.