I’ve followed all the frequent posters on piefed.social using my mastodon.social account so we should be seeing a lot more PieFed content showing up there now. But unless you use hashtags, I’ll be the only one seeing it!
When making your post, put a few words into the Tags field below the Body field, separated by a comma. No need to include the # character.
Yes although that doesn’t work very well (yet). Mastodon treats every reply as a new post which was boosted by the community which is spammy and bad UX.