You can still turn different types of notification off (Account preferences > Notifications) on a group by group basis.

That's fixed one problem that may have led to reports of missing (Android) notifications.

Android applies some other limits to notifications that can also lead to missing notifications.

Any Android app can't have more 50 active notifications. So if you get more than 50 Mastodon notifications at once Tusky will hide some of them, oldest first.

hi, i actually super dislike this change a whole lot! sort of a bad problem to have, but i am dealing with a viral toot that is now eating up way too much real estate by having the 3 notification types separated, on top of the bug with duplicate notifications spamming me with an *insane* amount of notifications

i do not like having to disable certain types of notifications and think that is an improper solution, and would much prefer the old way back

@listeninggarden Unfortunately, that's a side effect of how Android notifications work.

There's a few different things at play here.

Apps create notification "channels". This allows users to set per-channel notification settings. For example, mute a channel, or set a channel to "vibrate only".

Tusky creates a different channel for each notification type -- boosts, mentions, favourites, etc, so you can decide how you want to be notified about these different things.

Critically, Android does not allow apps to find out what the notification channel settings are.

This is so bad apps can't see you've muted their notifications and refuse to enable some behaviour until you unmute them. The user remains in control, and apps can't see if they've been muted for spamming.

Within a channel notifications can also be turned in to a summary. Newer Android versions automatically do this, but still expect apps to create special "Summary" notification(s).

@listeninggarden Previously, Tusky only created one summary notification, and summarised all the received notifications in there.

This caused at least two problems and possibly three.

1. Suppose you had muted the "boosts" channel. Tusky can't tell that you've done that (per earlier), so the summary notification might contain information about posts that had been boosted, but the user doesn't want to see those.

@listeninggarden 2. There's one channel for each notification type, so if there's only one summary notification, which channel should it go in? Previously Tusky picked the channel of the most recent notification.

But what if the user has muted that notification channel? Again, Tusky can't tell, and now your summary notification (and possibly all the notifications it's summarising, the Android documentation is unclear on this point) are muted, and you can't see them.

@listeninggarden I think this is one of the reasons why we were getting reports that Tusky was losing notifications. They were still being sent, but the summary notification was going to a muted channel, so Android was hiding all of them.

3. The Android documentation doesn't cover what happens if a summary notification summarises notifications in different channels. That's a sufficiently weird edge-case that I'm not too surprised.

@listeninggarden Mastodon doesn't let you mute notifications about a single post, only entire classes of notification (all boosts, all favourites, etc), so Tusky doesn't do that either.

I'm not saying we couldn't -- it might make an interesting future feature, although the UX would take a bit of working out. I've jotted down some notes about that https://github.com/tuskyapp/Tusky/issues/3666.

feature: Mute notifications for a single post · Issue #3666 · tuskyapp/Tusky

Allow the user to mute notifications on a post, so if they have a post that goes viral they can temporarily ignore notifications about just that post. Existing features to filter notifications or m...

^GitHub

@listeninggarden There's one other issue with v22 that will be changed in v23. An Android app can only have a maximum of 50 notifications. Post any more than that and they are dropped.

At the moment, when Tusky gets notifications it gets a block of the oldest ones that you haven't seen and posts those. But if you've got a lot of notifications (more than ~ 50), Tusky won't get all of them.

@listeninggarden So you get this behaviour where large blocks of notifications come in in chunks over time. This has led to user feedback that Tusky is slow to get notifications.

In v23 I'll change this -- each time Tusky gets new notifications it will get all of them, and delete the oldest ones until it's got no more than 50 to show. That behaviour will mean that some Mastodon notifications might not appear as Android notifications.

@listeninggarden But of the two possible behaviours I think trimming to just the newest ones is the most user friendly behaviour.

None of this affects what's on the Notifications tab -- that will always show all the notifications you have.

I hope that's helped explain why the current behaviour is the way it is. I appreciate that it's not the behaviour you want, but given the constraints imposed by Android and the Mastodon API it's what we have at the moment.

i greatly appreciate the very in-depth responses on how things got the way they are, and hate to see that there is a number of technical blockers on the os level that is causing problems

unfortunately, the change makes tusky completely invalid for my use, as i run with as much reduced clutter as possible for my own sanity. the prior method functioned perfectly, while this new one goes against my practices to minimalise noise without sacrificing access to information