I had to recompile nvidia-bl every time the Linux kernel updated or my backlight control keys wouldn’t work. Put up with it for four years then installed Windows 10 when it came out.
From someone who has tried pixelfed, it is basically a photo post filter for mastodon. You can see photo posts people make on mastodon from pixelfed and you can see pixelfed posts from Mastodon. So as mastodon apps improve and you can filter posts by content type (maybe you already can?) than pixelfed is basically irrelevant and/or equivalent to a photography focused mastodon instance.