Need help notifications

hie bubblers
anyone please help me here im stuck, i have successfully created a notifications systems but im having two unsolved issues. These are the workflows you can go through them
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  1. followers getting notifications from user that they follow only which is ok
  2. problem is users who are not on the followers getting notifications on all posts as well
  3. how to mark read and unread notifications ie. give a darker background to unread messages
  4. how to reset the notifications count back to zero once read. Right now the system keeps adding all notifications in the repeating group. i want a situation where a user has 2 unread notifications once they click on the bell it resets to zero and the next time a post is made it starts count from one and not three like what mine is doing .

many thanks guys