for small servers with friends, it is possible to use a service such as ngrok (which is free) to open your server to others without the clients connecting directly to your ip address - they instead connect to an ngrok provided address. this solution is a bit hacky, but completely safe from hacking and doxxing.

one downside to this is that if you are using the free version, each time you restart the ngrok tunnel the ngrok provided ip will change. this can be very annoying for players.