> I feel like the reactions take up a lot of unnecessary space

They are designed to be a little party about your post. In other apps, reactions are relegated as useless. And because of their UI choice, they definitely are useless. We are trying to bring meaningful reactions back. This means there should be an easy way to immediately extract meaning from the reaction set. The current interface is not perfect by any means (especially because this is mostly an old design updated constantly over the weeks), but that's what we are going for.

> should maybe be collapsed into a consolidated view that can be expanded to see them all if the user wants to.

That already happens in the posts in the regular feed. When users come to notifications, they want to see everything that has nappened. Hiding things that happened because we couldn't find a nicer UI yet is not a good idea.

> The stats would feel more natural below the post than above it.

I agree. But this is "new". We changed some of the reaction design in the feed and also added inline replies at the top which should have inverted the reaction set look in notifications. We will get there some day.

> there is no space between the pfp images so it just looks very busy and cluttered.

I tested adding some spaces, but it made the experience in low-end phones (which already don't have much space) a lot worse. So, we reverted until we get a better idea.

> The badge on the pfp has a lot going on and could be simplified.

On this image, it's just the profile picture and the badge uptop so you know which ones are the ones you follow. I am not sure why it is a "lot"

> And there is also not enough space between the text and the image in the actual post.

That is a problem between clients. In your post, there is no new line between "I’ve been missing you. " and the image url. So, it should be as close to the text as possible to correctly represent what the author wanted. Adding space is not what the author wanted to do.