Show an "unread" count for notifications?

[nikclayton]

Users have proposed showing an (optional) count of unread notifications on the notification tab icon.

I think this is difficult, because Mastodon doesn't have a concept of a notification being read or unread. A notification exists, and it either continues to exist, or the user deletes it, and that's it.

Pachli could maintain its own local read/unread state for each notification. However, that could lead to more user confusion -- the user could read a notification in another app, or in the web client, or in Pachli on two different devices, and see the same notification marked as "unread", and conclude that Pachli is at fault.

Mastodon does have a notification "marker" -- this records the ID of the most recent notification you have seen. This would allow the user to do something like "Mark everything below this notification as unread", but it doesn't let you, say, have 5 notifications and mark notifications 1, 2, and 5 as read, keeping 3 and 4 as unread.

Suggestions for how to present this to the user in an understandable way are welcomed.

[nikclayton]

I have just filed mastodon/mastodon#26866 as a feature request against Mastodon, which would allow this to be implemented.