Totally agree. I like the Fediverse (that’s why I’m here), but it is just too hard to find interesting content on mastodon. This way it will never attract a large crowd.
They probably use Cloudflare for Loadbalancing and Anti DDOS. This doesn’t mean it is hosted on Cloudflare, it is only a proxy. The point is not to show you the real IP so you can’t attack the origin server.
You just have to infiltrate one end, e.g. the smartphone of one party