NB: This will not work for instances that proxy outgoing requests!
I wanted to find a way to detect the real IP address of a Mastodon/Pleroma/Misskey/etc instance hosted behind Cloudflare. How to do that? Well, it's federated, which means I can probably get it to send a request to a server of mine! And how to do that? I tried reading the ActivityPub spec. The following caught my attention:
Servers should not trust client submitted content, and federated servers also should not trust content received from a server other than the content's origin without some form of verification.