Communities
Communities are a way of grouping posts, and are the equivalent of subreddits from Reddit. When a user wants to post a link, meme, or image, they will choose a community to post it to. Users can subscribe to communities, and posts from the communities they have subscribed to make up their "Subscribed" feed (sometimes called "Home"). This is in contrast to the "Local" feed (posts to any community where the community itself is on PieFedNZ), Popular (posts from more popular communities) and the "All" feed (all posts that PieFedNZ knows about).
Finding and subscribing to communities
From the top of the page you can click Communities to see a large list of all the communities PieFedNZ knows about. Also see Explore to help you find relevant posts and communities without needing to know the names of the communities.
Another way to search communities is to use the Lemmyverse.net community browser. Despite the name, it works for PieFed too.
First, click the house at the top right to set your home instance (to "piefed.nz"), then you can search for a topic of interest and find communities. Once you've set your home instance, you can click on a listed community to be directed to the community on PieFedNZ, allowing you to subscribe.
If you are the first subscriber from PieFedNZ, a handful of posts will be retrieved, but historic content and comments on these posts will not be retrieved. However, new posts and new comments posted will be available from this point forward. This is due to how Lemmy instances communicate.
Blocking communities
Don't like something? You don't have to see it! You can block users, communities, or even any posts from a certain instance!
On the default PieFedNZ website, click the "..." on a post in your feed and see an extensive list of options such as blocking the user, hiding all content from their instance, and more.
You may have options to do this in mobile apps depending on which one you are using.
If you click the cog at the top right to go to your settings, on the "Blocks & Filters" tab you will also see many other options. If you uncheck "Show Bot Accounts" then you won't see bot content (such as posts automatically copied from Reddit). Careful that you don't check "Bot account" on the "Profile" tab, as this marks your account as a bot and so people who have disabled bot accounts won't see your posts and comments.
Creating communities
PieFedNZ allows users to create communities. You can do this by clicking "Create local community" on the Communities page.
If you create a community you will become a moderator of the community and will be able to ban users from your community or remove posts as needed. Note that PieFedNZ administrators will always be able to take moderation actions in your community as they deem necessary, and may choose to delete the community if it does not fit within the rules of the instance.
NZ Communities
Almost all active communities related to NZ are on LemmyNZ, with a handful on other instances. You can see NZ content by viewing the New Zealand Communities topic. On the right you will see a list of communities in the topic, which you can visit to subscribe to individually. You may already be subscribed if this was selected during your account setup.