Yeah that was the intention; to keep everything self-hosted. Although cloudflare is great for some tasks one would have to take their word that they are not reading user data when they act as the TLS termination.

For the missing features please refer to the GitHub repository of the developer of Nitter: https://github.com/zedeus/nitter The "following users" suggestion is on the roadmap (account system) I don't know how far this feature is in development. You can open an issue there regarding the NSFW options. Thanks for the feedback! I hope my hosted services continue to be useful to you and others!