I think you missed my point. You are mistaking your preferred architecture with moral superiority.

Cloudflare is not “gatekeeping” someone from self-hosting. It is an optional tool. A person choosing to use it because they are new, budget-conscious, or not ready to expose services directly is not sad, fake self-hosting, or somehow philosophically impure.

You can absolutely argue that Cloudflare has tradeoffs. That is fair. It adds dependency, abstraction, and vendor-specific knowledge. It is not magic security dust. No disagreement there.

But telling a beginner “this is sad” because they are using a mainstream protective layer while learning is exactly the kind of gatekeeping that makes self-hosting communities hostile to newcomers.

Also, “just use a VPN” is not a universal answer. VPNs are great for private admin access. They are not always the right solution when someone wants family members to access media or services without managing VPN clients, device support, troubleshooting, and onboarding. Different threat models, different usability needs.

The helpful response would have been: “Cloudflare can be useful, but understand what it does and does not protect you from. Don’t expose admin panels. Use MFA, strong auth, least privilege, good backups, updates, reverse proxy rules, and keep anything sensitive behind a VPN.”

That is useful advice.

“This is sad” is just self-hosting purity signaling.

I have tagged you as “selfhosting gatekeeper” for future reference.