Where I live, many ISPs tie public IPs to static IPs if they are using CG-NAT. But of course there are other options as well. My point was that the other options don’t disappear.
Though I do get the point that Cloudflare aren’t giving away something for nothing. The main reason to me is to get hobbiest using it so they start using it (on paid plans) in their work, or otherwise get people to upgrade to paid plans. However, the “give something away for free until they can’t live without it then force them to pay” model is pretty classic in tech by now.
We start paying for static IPs. If cloudflare shuts down overnight, a lot of stuff stops working but no data is lost so we can get it back up with some work.
Yes, there’s fediseer that can help with that sort of thing. However, I think if it wasn’t spam, it may not get noticed as quick as you’d think. Create a lemmy.world account, post a meme, and use your special server to throw 50 or 100 upvotes at it, and probably no one would realise.
I guess I just don’t find it hard to chop things with a knife, which is very easy to clean. I have a food processor, but getting it out of the cupboard takes almost as much time as dicing an onion with a knife.