@hey Agreed about Friendica being good. I ran it before I ran Mastodon, and I'm going to go back to it when I get enough free time to do it.
I moved away when I thought it had issues with managing its database, but they ended up instead being issues with the hosting provider I was using offering block storage that was so uselessly slow that operations would simply time out, which ended up being a recipe for database corruption. My next implementation is going to be on real hardware.