No Federation, but Presearch is a Decentralized Search Engine that I’ve been using for ~6 months now. The results are about what I’d expect from your other major search engines. If you’re into crypto they also send you a small portion of their token as a reward when you search, although I don’t think they let you withdraw until you get a pretty large amount.

There’s an addon for your browser you can download to have it be your default search engine too!

I also have this problem on my own self-hosted instance, but after I search I can find it in Communities.

It makes a lot of sense, but with the way organizations such as Internet Archive are saving webpages from Reddit, wouldn’t it be feasible to train your models off of those sites to circumvent any API charges?