@at To update you on the lists situation, well, the pruning did work in giving me a nice manageable hometimeline. There’s only like one third the notifications from overnight (of course, this is a weekend so the volume is lower) and I am able to make my way through the reduced timeline so much easier.
But … you were right about the lists 🙂 Akkoma appears to work the same as Mastodon in that you have to be following someone in order for their posts to show up in a list.
I did look this up for Mastodon and there’s an open feature request asking that either users be able to have lists without following people or be able to filter out people in lists from their home timeline but there doesn’t seem to be much movement on it.
So I think I’ll have to end up doing this client-side. Just filter out posts/boosts on the home timeline from people who are on my lists. This should be easy enough if you have source code to the client and that should theoretically allow you to have the functionality I wanted. I guess I’ll try that and see …