it is possible to do this, but it looks like you have explicitly set the parameter &observations_by=following to get mentions on observations that you’re not actually following yet:
(i don’t know why they implemented this in such a way that you have to explicitly set the parameter, but it is what it is.)
…
you asked separately whether you can use the SwaggerUI-based API documentation page to test API calls, and you can. just get a JWT from https://www.inaturalist.org/users/api_token, and then copy and paste just the api_token value from that JSON to the appropriate spot on the page:
