lemmy notifications in xfce.. random + intermittent

Hello, new lemmy ex-redditor here. Is this a good place for questions?

I decided to try turning on notifications for the lemmy/fediverse sites I am joining the past week or so. I don't usually use notifications on the computer so not sure what is expected.

I am intermittently getting notifications but I can't tell where they are coming from.

They have an avatar and a small amount of text. Clicking on them doesn't have any effect (like bringing you to the originating site). I haven't been able to find matching content in the notifications of any of the sites. They don't seem to have much to do with any conversations I am involved in; I think I am subscribed to some sort of general "new post" or "new comment" thing. I am not getting any notifications that are relevant to me; just these ones.

notifyd tray item is set to log notifications but there is no log... I remember trying to solve that at some point but didn't come up with much and gave up due to low priority.

Is there some way in firefox/linux to track down the events?

They are not like a constant barrage so testing by disabling things and seeing what happens would not be very straightforward.

What is supposed to happen when you enable notifications? Is this typical?

I am using: Xfce 4.18 + firefox