A few months ago I turned off basically all notifications, as I was getting inundated with emails for threads I didn’t care about. To keep email notifications to a reasonable level, I had to go in and explicitly unsubscribe from threads I didn’t want to hear about. The other day, I discovered “watching first post,” which seemed like just what I wanted. Notify me of the first post to a thread, but no others unless I specifically follow that thread. (Right?)
I think these options only control the notifications and counters on the web site.
In mailing list mode, it’s the firehose with little control; I found that muting entire categories work (e.g. Ideas), but not muting one thread for example.
I consume Python Discourse mainly as RSS and get the behaviour you are looking for. My subscription settings are default (Normal). Only a new topic is an “unread” message in RSS. When I select a message, the message pane fetches the discussion in its latest state and it is “read”.
Downsides:
It is a little clunky to set up a subscription (per category). I’m probably doing it wrong (Thunderbird).
I tend not to notice a new categories (requiring subscription).
