Your instance is quite a bit cut off from the rest of the Fediverse, although even so the news of Friendica has made waves - e.g. beehaw.org/post/521802 with >800 comments.

Friendica is fairly niche though, and suffers from a lot of problems. For one, as a Facebook replacement it relies upon your family members and close friend group to also use it - but unless you act as tech support and install it onto their machines for them (alongside Linux and everything needed for them to self-host), then how else will you be able to communicate with them on that platform?

And it more or less does need to be either self-hosted or at least hosted exceedingly often, since it does not scale well and users of the project have started begging for technical support from outsiders (not a great example of the latter but see this informational post).

In short, there are reasons for its lack of spread so far. I do not know if those issues are solvable - though by now perhaps they already have been? It’s just a very different model from the more semi-anonymous platforms like the Fediverse, which can make things challenging.