Notifications are a pain point:
giving people the ability to curate their notifications. Notifications are what’s driving them nuts. Not posts, not even the technology of Mastodon – it’s replies from assholes.
They need notifications grouped, they really do. Hell, I want that enough that I mostly look at replies from my phone, where I have an ap that groups them.
They need to be able to turn on something like Twitter’s old “quality replies” filter, which served as a junk filter, and a block against pointless below-ban-level negging.
And they need to be able to do it at scale, because if you have 100,000 followers, you can’t reasonably do it one at a time. It’s simply not possible.
Your experience is valid and I’m sure a lot of people share it. I’m using Discuss.Online differently than Reddit and have been enjoying it more as a result, but the software leaves a lot to be desired and there are fewer communities I’m interested in and of those many are sparsely interacted with by others. There are a few subreddits that died off and never established a federated alternative too.