Is anyone else getting a dystopian vibe from the idea of "managing" friends and family?

I can definitely see this service being useful, but that branding makes me feel very uncomfortable.

No. My wife and I foster, so keeping track of hearings, therapies, medications, milestones, visitations, continuing education, etc. is quite a chore. This looks intriguing, but we are already restricted from posting to any social media, so as a family we decided to not host any data externally, if we can help it. If this were self hosted I'd be taking a much closer look.

It is self hosted if you like, it's open source. Feel free to host it yourself. https://github.com/monicahq/monica