Yes and no. Behind a CDN is good, but people commonly use Cloudflare which has built-in bot protection, and the federation between fediverse nodes looks a lot l

Yes and no. Behind a CDN is good, but people commonly use Cloudflare which has built-in bot protection, and the federation between fediverse nodes looks a lot like bots, and Mastodon isn't going to fill out a captcha, it'll just de-federate and break the network. Configuring a CDN correctly of course will work, but I've done some basic analysis of the network and that is not happening, looks like a lot of first-time sysadmins running Mastodon without knowing about these sorts of things.