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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.
@staff could I ask a clarifying question... is the intent to disable the two timelines by default but allow individual users to re-enable; or to disable entirely without any option to re-enable?
@staff Is this what would have broke the 'Local' page on Tusky? It stopped showing anything a few weeks ago, but I couldn't find any announcements with them or on mastodon.online's site to indicate anything that had changed, and no settings I could find could get it working again.
@mcnewton Quite likely. This setting was included in the last major release, but some third-party client apps may not have added support for checking if these timelines are disabled yet.
@staff @mcnewton To be fair, that change was not proactively communicated to third party client developers in the official Mastodon GmbH developer relations Discord channel.
Nor is it mentioned in https://blog.joinmastodon.org/categories/trunk-and-tidbits/.
It was mentioned in https://blog.joinmastodon.org/2025/10/mastodon-4-5-for-devs/, but only after 4.5 was released, and even then the original post didn't mention it, it was updated days later.
So it's unsurprising that third party developers missed this.
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.
