The real alternative is super simple. It requires just a little bit of knowledge. All we would need is to have someone who is an enterprise grade sysadmin with nothing but free time and a willingness to do something they will barely get paid for, if not lose money on. Then we also need to hire out a dedicated network and security engineer as well as a dedicated network traffic monitor. Then we would need to implement and setup our own hosting, as well as servers and configure our own databases. Of course all of this has to be done as cheaply as possible by people who are so good at multiple different sectors of IT and could easily be making more money doing work, but obviously out of the kindness of their hearts want to progress the fediverse and Lemmy rather than realizing they could be making 200k+ doing the same thing for a private company rather than a hobby.

In short: we need a network engineer, a security analyst, a sysadmin (or maybe 2?) all of whom work 24/7 for free and then purchase all of the physical hardware with the knowledge and capacity to set it up and maintain it to nearly break even just so we can shitpost rather than those people working and making 200k+ a year.

The problem is not the service is that Cloudflare is a mega corporation. Having anti-ddos service which does nothing else is perfectly fine. Having one that also fingerprints everyone and does who-knows-what with all that absurd amount of data and control is a different issue entirely.

Well, it's not without evidence, we have plenty of that through the years. Unfortunately, we also don't have any real alternatives either, so the choice is take the DDoS or get Cloudflare. Not much of a choice.