I use Discourse mostly as a mailing list - I read through using my email client. Previously I had enabled “mailing list mode” but that generated a huge quantity of emails, mostly for topics I wasn’t interested in. I could unsubscribe from individual topics, but that takes multiple clicks and when scanning through 30 threads is kinda a pain.
My new strategy is to use the “Watching First Post” feature on pretty much all the categories, so I get an email with the first post of any new topic. Then I can subscribe to the ones I’m interested in. Basically making it opt-in instead of opt-out.
I also set it so that when I reply to a topic, it automatically sets it to “Watching”. If I replied that’s a pretty good signal that I’m interested in that topic.
This has cut down dramatically on how long it takes me to keep track of the things I’m interested in on Discourse.
edit: ack - accidentally posted before I had typed anything.