Just realized maybe some instance admins haven't seen this page, but I *did* describe how exactly Mastodon can be tuned: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/blob/master/docs/Running-Mastodon/Tuning.md
The tips & tricks I wanted to write about when I have time are specific hardware / deployment decisions; but general principles *are* already described in that documentation page
@Gargron what is the server of mastodon.social?