I run my own, and it’s not that much time. I’d imagine more users would make it more difficult (I’m effectively the only user on the instance), but not by much more from what I’ve heard, especially if you know all of them.

For messing up: Do regular backups. They’re cheap, usually pretty easy to set up (I use borgbase for it), and if something goes wrong you can usually restore it to a working state minus a few posts.

Friendica also doesn’t update super often, so it’s minimal upkeep beyond the usual “Restart it to fix it” problems, and it’s pretty rare for people to actually care about uptime.

My ONLY gripe is it doesn’t notify you of user moderation reports. I don’t have to care (it’s just me, and I’m not banning myself), but on a higher user instance I can see that mattering more. Maybe ask people to DM you when they send a report or something, and just get into a habit of checking them