@teozard I solved some of my load issue by blocking some IPs that were abusively polling my server. I dealt with the follower load by adjusting my configuration.

The way this could be solved is by somebody setting up a massive pubsubhubbub server and charging some kind of fee to servers to service your followers. This is what pubsubhubbub is for, it just so happens that both GS and Mastodon run their own (Mastodon used to use a service but stopped because the service sucked.)