How do I stop getting visual notifications for comments in a toot I'm not participating in, sent by someone I don't even follow? Is there a particular switch I couldn't find under my channel settings?
That post came in because a connection boosted it (or at least, that was my impression).
That post came in because a connection boosted it (or at least, that was my impression).
There's only thing you can possibly to do reduce the chance of this happening in the future.
Let's suppose you have contacts on Mastodon who really behave like Mastodon users. They boost everything they like. They clutter your stream with tons of uninteresting boost spam. One of the reasons why your unread counter goes to "99+" in no time.
If you want to get rid of that boost spam from certain contacts, do as follows:
You'll now find two filter lists, an allowlist and a blocklist, just like for your channel, only that these only affect the content coming in from/through this particular contact.
?verb == AnnounceThis will filter out all boosts/renotes/reposts/repeats from that contact.