OK, I did another round of searching for answers.. I understood a lot from these two posts - https://schub.wtf/blog/2018/02/01/activitypub-one-protocol-to-rule-them-all.html and https://schub.wtf/blog/2019/01/13/activitypub-final-thoughts-one-year-later.html (from one person behind diaspora).
It seems the apps started out initially just federating with instances of themselves. When this was the case, they used webfinger for discovering accounts and information about an account. All the apps are just using @username@installation_domain (and not root domain). Peertube has no setting like LOCAL_DOMAIN - https://github.com/Chocobozzz/PeerTube/blob/develop/config/production.yaml.example#L6 . Same for pixel fed - https://github.com/pixelfed/pixelfed/blob/dev/.env.example#L7 . I guess nobody has gotten to the point of having the same @username@rootdomain to be used across apps. This makes sense because the apps don't really talk to each other apart from providing an activitypub stream. Think of it as each of those document editors supporting MSXML. None of them could load each others stuff in the very early days.
In essence, the correct approach for Cloudron for now is to not let LOCAL_DOMAIN be configurable in mastodon. It's just confusing that it even exists without the surrounding standards to support it across apps.
