Every single rapist and murderer was found to have dihydrogen monoxide inside their body at the time they committed their crimes, and your friends and family may be using it recreationally without you knowing
This is ironically is the biggest problem with the fediverse in my opinion, eveything is connected and interoperable in some way but also not fully. It’s confusing and probably puts a lot of people off
If you’re exposing via cloudflare tunnels instead of pointing at your public IP then eveything other people have said covers it. If you are using your public IP then it’s worth blocking non-cloudflare IPs from accessing the site directly
Pihole is great for blocking on things that you can’t install a local adblocker on. It does have downsides though, it can be annoying and block things you don’t want it to. It might not block ads well on your tv or might impair the functionality in weird ways. It can depend lot on which lists you add, but there are many available and they are usually quite well documented about their intentions.
Even if you run your own instance, if you’re federated with other instances then your posts, comments and upvotes could still be scraped by someone else
Maybe because it was a work laptop I didn’t spend as much time on setup as I would for a personal computer. There’s were a lot of issues that I solved with tweaking at the start, but many of the lingering issues either had no solution or were so intermittent or complex that I couldn’t figure out how to word it in a way that would lead me to the solution.