For the moment I'm not saying much specific about it. There's no real big reason, it's just sort of how I like to do things. My parents always joked that I'd come back married one day and not even mention it.
I can try to message you when I'm satisfied with the progress of it. Otherwise I'll be around these posts in the future. After learning this much about networking, I'll feel pretty relieved. I'll be ready for the bigger and more important steps that come next.
My ISP blocks incoming data on ports 80 and 443. I also require a Dynanic DNS to handle my changing IP address. The only way I found to obtain a Let's Encrypt certificate is through a DNS challenge in this situation.
I can definitely run without Cloudflare but I won't have SSL which will affect federation.