I found Friendica to work well for one user, but as soon as you add more, you really need to scale up and it gets very expensive to host very fast. I also had this issue where Google would just block my server, so anyone with a gmail account couldn’t get their login info…
There are things I like about it, and as the Fediverse as a whole starts growing, I might just set up a single-use Friendica instance for myself, but be prepared for headaches if you want to get a “small” server for your family.