How Cloudflare's Bot Protection Inadvertently Breaks Mastodon

Website owners running both Cloudflare and Mastodon may unwittingly break critical features like domain verification and link previews. Cloudflare's Bot Fight Mode blocks requests from Mastodon crawlers running on Hetzner infrastructure, a popular but high-risk network for bot operators. This issue reveals a fundamental challenge for federated platforms: they cannot register with every major CDN, forcing users to choose between robust security and platform compatibility.