Reclaiming the Old Style “Most Recent” Feed in Facebook: a Workaround

If you’re like me, you may not be super excited about the recent changes to Facebook’s home page. I have simple needs. I just like seeing the most recent updates from all my friends in chronological order with the newest posts first.

I don’t need Facebook telling me what posts it thinks are most important and putting them at the top of the feed. I can figure that out myself. I don’t need that ticker either, with it’s crazy pop-up windows.

After a little tinkering tonight, I think I happened upon a workaround to address these annoyances and reclaim much of the “Most Recent” feed functionality of the old Facebook layout.

It’s not a perfect solution and a bit of a pain to set up, but it gets rid of the ticker, puts all your friends’ updates in the feed, lists them in chronological order, and doesn’t require installing a browser extension, Facebook apps, or anything.

Here’s what you do:

1. Go to the list menu in the left sidebar and create a list.

2. Call it “everybody” or something like that.

3. Add all of your friends to the new list (this will be pain in the ass if you have a lot of friends–that’s where the time and elbow grease come in).

4. In the left sidebar under the lists heading, click on your new “everybody” list so you see that view.

5. Note that there is no ticker on the right hand side. You should also be seeing a chronological view of all your friends’ updates in your feed.

6. Click on the upper right hand corner of that view where it says “manage list.”

7. Select “Choose Update Types.” This will allow you to decide what kind of stuff you want in the feed. I chose everything except game notifications.

8. You might consider bookmarking this view. Then you can use it as your replacement FB home page, since you can post updates, etc. from this view just like the default home page.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful. I guess we’ll see how long it lasts before the overlords at FB change things up again.