Reduce Notifications from a Facebook Group?

My theory is that Facebook designs the user interface for people who are members of a dozen or so relatively low-traffic groups and that once you join a single busy group, it does exactly what you say, overtaking everything else in your Notifications and your news stream. Make it two or three high activity groups — as I’m in — and it’s crazy, almost as if that’s all you have happening on Facebook.

Still, I don’t want to quit those groups because they’re popular. Otherwise it’s kind of a Groucho Marx sort of logic, where you only want to be in groups where there’s not much going on.

So what’s to do? Well, the easiest thing is to simply change the setting so that you’re only getting notifications of activity from Facebook if your friends post in the group, rather than for every single post regardless of who it’s from.

There are two places you can make that change, the easiest being directly from your newsfeed. On the left side, you’ll have a list of your groups with recent activity, kinda like this:

You can see that “Stay At Home Dad…”  has 10 new entries, “Dad Bloggers” has 17, “Pollinate Media Group” has 9 and the “Kickstarter Board Games” group has, well, none. Still, let’s use that one as our proverbial guinea pig anyway.

To adjust the notifications, move your cursor to the left of the group name until the tiny pencil icon appears, then click on it. Here are your choices:

Choose “Edit Settings” and a big window appears:

As you can see, mine is set to “All Posts”. That’s a bit much in some groups, so click on it to see the options:

Changing it to “Friends’ Posts” definitely slows down the notifications unless you have a group where everyone is a friend, in which case you’re going to see lots of notifications unless you choose “Off”.

If your group isn’t showing up on the newsfeed, you can also access this setting from the group itself:

That should help tame things. Otherwise you’re on your own, and good luck!