With friends tab and feeds 4 years ago

Recently we made a change to remove the With Friends tab from user profiles. We did this after finding out that this tab was both a relatively rarely accessed as well as computationally expensive page for us to serve.

At the same time we removed access to the feeds for this page. It’s still possible for users to receive their own With Friends timelines, but authentication is required. What we did not anticipate was that some users were subscribing to these feeds in readers. Most readers do not support authentication, so the feeds that these folks were subscribing have since broken.

It’s our hope to bring back the access to these feeds at some point. But for stability reasons, we’re unable to restore them at this time. We should have done a better job explaining this up front and anticipating this problem. Apologies for this; it’s our highest priority to provide a reliable, stable service for everyone.