Don't alert for filtered notification types

[prohr]

Currently, filtering out notification types prunes them from the list of displayed notifications. I can toggle them on/off as needed, which is handy.

However, they still cause my phone to ping on arrival, which gets obnoxious.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior:

1. Accidentally go viral (even slightly)
2. Get overwhelmed by alerts from boosts + favorites
3. In notifications, toggle off those two alert types for a little temporary relief
4. See them immediately disappear from the notifications list. Phew!
5. A few minutes later, phone blows up again
6. Click through to notifications + see no matches there. Huh?

Expected behavior When I toggle a notification type off, don't alert me for those.

If you silently record what happened in case I toggle those types back on later, then the ability to see them might be nice. But if it's easier to just suppress those notifications entirely, that'd be fine too.

Versions 1.0

[nikclayton]

At step 3, when you write:

In notifications, toggle off those two alert types for a little temporary relief

where are you doing the toggling?

If you do it in "Account preferences > Notifications" that should change how Android notifications are shown (including whether they appear, make a sound, vibrate, bypass do not disturb, etc).

If you're not making changes there then you should, that's the correct place to make them.

If you are making changes there and you're still seeing Android notifications for things you've silenced using the Android controls that's an Android bug, I think.

Pachli cannot see what your settings in "Account preferences > Notifications" are set to. Android enforces this -- this is so that an app cannot refuse to function unless you have enabled its notifications (imagine a game that says it's free to play, as long as you allow notifications from the app).

I think there's utility in keeping the types of notification that create an Android notification and the type that shows up in the notifications tab separate, For example, I don't display boosts or favourites in the notifications tab, because I treat that as a todo list of "mentions that I might need to reply to". But I do want android notifications for everything, so I have those enabled but sent to silent,

I can see how having two different controls for managing notifications could be confusing. Would it help if the following changes were made:

1. Change the "Filter notifications" dialog title to "Choose notifications to show" or similar
2. Add some help text at the bottom of the dialog, something like "This affects notifications in this list. To change Android notifications open "Android notifications"."
3. Add a third button to the dialog, at the left, labeled "Android notifications", which opens the same screen as "Account preferences > Notifications".

?

[prohr]

As a fellow dev, I'm capable of giving a more thoughtful reply (more on that in a minute) but when this happened to me, I was in full on "don't make me think" mode, because all the alerts were driving me nuts.

Me dumb user.
Me get too many alerts from noisy phone. Click one. Me get sent to bell screen. Me click on filter button.

Those. Those are the annoying ones. Hush you!

[prohr]

We're definitely in different use cases then.

In your scenario, it makes sense to send all notifications to the Android alert system, then allow a separate set of controls (which Pachli can't see the state of) tweak how annoying the notifications are. For you, the subset that's visible in-app is much smaller than what Android can ping you about.

For my use case, there's zero value in having Android ping me about something I don't care if I see in the app. (I actually found it downright confusing, perhaps because having a post go even slightly viral was so surprising + stressful.) I was right there. Why wasn't it doing what I wanted?

Insofar as all of these notifications only get to Android off the wire if you send them there, then my suggested behavior -- don't tell Android about stuff you're not displaying -- is technically feasible, but it does privilege my use case over yours.

For a potential UX solution which implements my suggested approach (filter from both display + alerts) but also supports your use case (use mentions as a TODO list), see the separate feature request I filed for grouped notifications.