If you're pushing, why would the other instance pull from you? Do one or the other. You also don't need to push for each post. You can batch push once per secon

If you're pushing, why would the other instance pull from you? Do one or the other. You also don't need to push for each post. You can batch push once per second or whatever. Push the image too so they don't request from you. Again, this may not be how mastodon works, but mastodon is clearly designed poorly. I have systems at work that have no problem gossiping thousands of updates per second to hundreds of subscribers. You also don't have to have a single global federated network to have a useful system. If North America were isolated from Europe or India that would still be useful to tons of people. Or people might segregate into communities based on interest, and don't need to send the same tweet to different communities since it's not relevant to both groups.