Every public request to one of my sites used to go through a Cloudflare tunnel. I had a cloudflared deployment in my cluster, some routing rules, and everything just worked. And it was free! But that bugged me. TANSTAAFL right? The whole point of selfhosting is to not rely on big cloud company, and there are few bigger than Cloudflare. And Cloudflare’s tunnels decrypt every single packet, so they see everything you do. I really don’t like that.
So I’ve replaced Cloudflare tunnels with Erwan Leboucher’s towonel, a selfhosted tunnel implementation. I still have my DNS on Cloudflare, but no data is moving through them any more.
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Thats the part right there. Its for not your device to access.
Like a self- hosted website/blog for example. Or taking the complexity of “start this before you try to connect to my eBook server” for your BIL, or “OK mom, when you want to watch the home videos I converted to digital you have to do it only from your phone, press this first, then share to your TV”.
That is the part I think you are missing. Use other than yourself and your own managed devices.