Given that the CCP monitors all of this stuff it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that if you run a VPN long or often enough without providing stating why that it’ll either end up blocked or you’ll end up in trouble.
How do you know this? I have friends living in China that states otherwise.
I thought Friendica scaled well.
You could try to do this with Lemmy, but with only the features lemmy already offer.
You could also check piefed