In my settings, I’ve turned off all the notifications except those that mention me. This means I only get notified in a few cases: 1. someone mentions me, 2. a comment is made on an observation I follow, 3. someone disagrees with my identification, or 4. someone provides a finer ID them mine. To be honest, I don’t know how people function without doing this.
I generally open new observations in new tabs. This has the unfortunate consequence of taking up a lot of space on my browser, but at least I see them all. If I have a lot, I try to open as many I can through my dashboard, so that I can go through them at my own pace.
Probably more controversially, I also often “opt out” of observations where I’ve previously added identifications above species level when someone provides a finer ID (“opting out” means I withdraw my ID, unfollow the observation, and mark it as unreviewed; I use Megachile’s Universal Metadata Tool [ https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/announcing-the-universal-metadata-tool-beta-by-megachile/53182 ] to do so with 1 click). While not exactly ideal, it does prevent me from seeing notifications on that observation. The main reason I started doing this is that it made it easier to download my identifications, but another byproduct is that I can be pretty confident that most of my identifications are at species level (which gives me personal satisfaction).
With these settings and behaviors, my notifications rarely go above 20, and it’s extremely rare that they get anywhere close to 50, even when I’ve been inactive for a while. Now, I do commonly end up with over 100 tabs that as I accumulate observations that I don’t know what to do with, but that’s another story.