We plan to disable the "live feeds" of the local and federated timelines on mastodon.social within in the next couple of weeks. They are already disabled on mastodon.online. While these feeds can be useful on smaller, topical or regional servers, they have limited use on larger servers like ours.
The live feeds present all content on the server immediately and essentially pre-moderation, which presents a particularly poor experience to new users finding the fediverse for the first time.
Recommended follows, trending, and searching for hashtags all provide a far better discovery experience for newcomers, and we intend to improve discovery features more in 2026.
Note that we do have the ability to restore live feed access to individual users, and will consider this on a case-by-case basis. We will proactively reach out to trusted flaggers to offer this in advance.
If you have a fediverse account, you can quote this note from your own instance. Search https://mastodon.social/users/staff/statuses/115849915967029918 on your instance and quote it. (Note that quoting is not supported in Mastodon.)
