Feeds v3: New Features & Stronger Performance
TL;DR
- Feeds v3 loads up to 300% faster than v2, so feeds appear almost instantly when a user opens the app.
- For You feeds now rank activities against each user's actual interests and behavior, not just who they follow.
- Stories, polls, @mentions, and Reddit-style nested comments ship out of the box.
- Built-in moderation tools (ban, block, flag, review queues) and on-demand translation are new in v3.
- Existing v2 customers can migrate with minimal downtime using our Agent Skills.
Feeds v3 rebuilds the core feed experience around three pillars: speed, personalization, and social features that once required custom engineering. It keeps the scale that powers apps with over 100 million users while closing gaps left open by v2.
Below is a breakdown of what changed and why it matters.
Feeds That Load Instantly
Feeds v3 delivers up to 300% faster load times than v2. Feeds appear the moment a user opens the app, with no pause while aggregation and ranking run.
What drives the speed:
- Precomputed aggregation. Aggregation keys are built on write, so opening an aggregated feed doesn't require assembling it on the spot.
- Fast ranking. A fast expression parser re-ranks feeds quickly as new activity comes in.
- Client-side permissions. A full permission model lets most feed actions, like posting, reacting, or loading the next page, run on the client instead of requiring a server round-trip.
Read latency holds at roughly 11 to 15 milliseconds at the 50th percentile, tested against a simulated 100 million users and peak loads of several million concurrent readers, achieving a 100% success rate across all scenarios.
Personalized For You Feeds
v3 introduces a For You feed that ranks activities against each user's known preferences and interests, and combines it with a regular Following feed. Activity selectors determine what shows up:
- Popularity - what's trending
- Location - what's happening nearby
- Interest - content matched to a user's known preferences
- Following - updates from people they follow
- Follower suggestions - activity from accounts they might want to follow
Up to 10 selectors can combine into a single feed, and users can filter results further by media type, language, or tags, with minimal cost to performance.
Richer Social Features, Built In
v3 ships a set of social primitives that used to require custom build-out:
- Stories - activities with an expiration date, with built-in tracking for what a user has and hasn't watched
- Polls and @mentions - ready to enable without extra infrastructure
- Reddit-style comments - unlimited nesting depth, with voting and ranking, so threaded discussion is a core part of the feed
- Translation - activity and comment text can be translated on demand into any of Stream's supported languages, with the original always preserved alongside the translation
Moderation, Out of the Box
v3 adds a moderation layer that wasn't part of v2:
- User moderation - ban (including timeouts, shadow bans, and IP bans) and block users, with blocking applied bidirectionally so neither user sees the other
- Content moderation - flag activities or comments for review, with configurable rules for block lists and AI-based image moderation
- Review queues - a queryable queue for moderators to work through flagged content
Seamless Migration
Moving to v3 doesn't require switching everything over at once. Stream replicates live traffic from a v2 app to a new v3 app in real time while historical data exports and imports in the background, so both versions stay in sync throughout.
Once an integration is fully on v3, finishing the migration is a single step, or teams can let v2 traffic taper off naturally with no action required.
For the mapping work that used to mean digging through a v2 schema by hand, the /stream-feeds-migration agent skill samples an app's actual v2 data (recent activities and a spread of reactions) and generates the mapping configuration automatically, calling out each choice and what the sample can't confirm. That mapping plugs directly into the Dashboard migration flow and drives both the live sync and the historical export, so the setup work happens once.
Ready to Move to v3
Teams still running Feeds v2 don't need a full rebuild to get these improvements. Reach out to your account team to start the migration, or contact Stream support for questions related to your specific use case.
