Apologies if this is already a known thing that you guys are working on but I did a search for unread and I saw a bunch of closed tasks and commits that seem like they should have already covered this.
In our install we have notifications enabled and are using Aphlict and all that.
We do get little popups at the bottom left when something happens, but they go away after a couple seconds and then there is nothing letting us know that something new happened.
We don't get any kind of a change on the notification bar or on the title bar saying that there are unread notifications and if you click on the notification icon, it looks like nothing is indicated as unread. Everything seems to be in a lighter shade.
If there's just a setting I'm missing somewhere, please let me know.