I feel like as long as your home instance can keep alive with donations then it will scale well. If your home instance starts needing a subscription or shows ads you could always migrate elsewhere. (But that's a pain I have already done that)
I found kids were a good catalyst for meeting people. Go to parks with then talk with parents. Do free kid activities at local libraries/art galleries/science centers and you are pretty much going to have to talk to other parents. If you go to things regularly then eventually you will see other regulars and the connection will grow. Our local rec center has kid activity times where a lot of other parents meet.
I use a virtualbox vm for work. Linux desktop runs a windows VM with Windows 10 and all my work stuff on it. I love it, its been very reliable. Its mostly simple though, it doesn't need to be super speedy, just needs to house my orgs mandatory vpn and av so I can connect to my work stuff.
Sync! It was great but now I gotta buy it all over again which is kinda a bummer.