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You can filter out whatever you don't want to get. Maybe don't subscribe to transfers, votes and comments, but do subscribe to things like people's posts (I get notifications when interesting people I follow make a post), mentions of certain words, etc.

Oh cool, guess it has improved since I first tested it. Thanks for the info!

You have a huge variety of things you can choose to get notified about now, so you should definitely give it a second chance once it gets back online. I pretty much only get notified about mentions, resteems, and posts from a few selected authors, and I don't get much spam. However, I'm probably getting a lot less interactions here than you do, so you might end up getting spammed even when keeping the settings strict.