Not sure where this falls on lemmy’s roadmap or if there is a github issue for it, but you can turn off notifications in piefed per post or comment. You can also enable notifications for posts/comments that aren’t your own if there is a thread you want to keep tabs on.
Well, it can federate with lemmy instances and there are way, way more lemmy users/communities than there are piefed user/communities. If you want to see the local communities on a piefed instances, it would be at
/communities/local
. This is the page for piefed.social.