You can use pixelfed with the same account, but to do this you will have to go onto your mastodon instance and follow a pixelfed accounts from there and they will appear in your Mastodon timeline. Here is a little explanation of the “log in with Mastodon” option.

For me the biggest speedup in my workflow was not through actually cutting down on the build time but rather using cargo watch. With cargo watch -x run, it automatically rebuilds and runs on any change so by the time I switch to the terminal it’s almost completely ready.