There needs to be a way to only get one push notification for every new message in a group chat
I dont know about others, but sometimes I am not able to check my phone, or be fully present in a conversation that I'm part of. Maybe I'm concentrating on work, or driving, and not able to look. It gets distracting when my phone is constantly buzzing and chiming for 5 minutes straight. Muting the chat can help, but if you forget to check it, or get added to a new one, you can't really do anything about it. I just want to be able to get notified once that the chat has new messages, decide how I want to react, and then move on from it. Is that too much to ask?
It should be mostly possible with ntfy, except everything would have to use it, and most apps just use one of the centralized push notification services.
I have a mildly smart home, and the server sends a push notification via ntfy. I have one of those mobile automaton tools on my phone that plays an mp3 when it sees that kind of notification. Then I have audio notifications turned off in the ntfy app my phone. With sufficiently advanced rules, I think you could set up something like you suggest; if not, a custom app could do it - one notification, and then there rest are silent until you dismiss it.
It's not a complete solution (unless you use Matrix, which can be configured to send notifications via ntfy), but my point is there's little technically preventing a solution being hacked together with existing tools. Except for those apps that only use Google or Apples push notification systems. Which is most of them.
I think your last paragraph sums up the reason for my frustration. Most of my family and friends are only chatting via the standard text app for their respective phones, and so I specifically would want to configure those notifications
No. I know it was something I configured in FluffyChat, and for that to work it must have sent the configuration to the Synapse server; my account is on matrix.org. This is in the Notifications settings of FluffyChat:
Tusky (Mastodon) can also use ntfy, so Mastodon server(s) must support it too. Ring, most (all?) of the Futo communications apps, like Circles. I think ntfy is common for the fdroid/OSS app developers; I see it a lot in OSS apps, like Home Assistant.