For me its having a single instance that indexes all the communites to which all other instances can then pull that information from so when I go searching for communities the I’ll have access to every single one with needing to post the entire URL in the search bar
I have run into the same issue. Although I can’t figure out if that is working as intended or if the server is just overloaded and the read signal just never got processed correctly. As I have had some notifications go away seemly automatically but other notifications refuse to go away until I click read. But maybe I actually did click read and just didn’t realized, I am still getting use to the interface.