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The Teams Discover Feed and Its Settings
The Discover Feed is shown at the top of the teams list and is available to users with more than five channels. Its intention is to highlight unseen messages that might otherwise be missed. A setting to enable or disable the Discover feed is in the Chats and Channels section of Teams settings (Figure 1).
After selecting a message in the Discover feed, users can also customize how the feed selects messages in the future by using the more options menu to opt not to see posts from the person who posted the message or the channel that they posted to. Clicking the settings (cogwheel) icon in the top-right corner of the feed shows the users and channels that the feed currently ignores (Figure 2).
The Discover feed sounds like an excellent feature, but I don’t use the feed very often. The reason is that Teams doesn’t support the Discover Feed for guest users. Most of my work with Teams is as when signed in as a guest into other tenants. In some of those tenants, where I am I am member of several teams with many channels, I would use the Discover feed if it was available to me, but it’s not.
I assume that the reason why guests are not supported is that some data relating to the feed is stored in the user mailbox (where most settings are located). Guest accounts have cloud-only special mailboxes, but maybe the work to hold these settings in those mailboxes hasn’t been done. All speculation on my part!
Users Must Have At least Five Channels to see the Discover Feed
All of which brings me to message center notification MC1066160 (1 May 2025) where Microsoft announced that they are limiting access to the feed unless users are part of five or more channels (including hidden channels). It’s an example of a change to tweak an existing feature, just like the change to introduce calendar notifications in the Activity Feed made last year.
This change is already active for Teams desktop and web clients. There’s nothing that tenant administrators need to do (or can do) relating to the change. Everything happens in client code and there’s no way for administrators to disable the Discover feed feature or control how it works on either a user-specific or tenant-wide basis.
Microsoft says that the change will “help to ensure the Discover Feed includes meaningful updates and conversations and avoids showing an empty or low-activity feed.” Their logic is simple. The Discover feed exists to highlight information that you might otherwise miss because of a lack of time to scan every channel available to you. If you can only access three or four channels, you don’t need this help because it’s as easy to check which channel names are bolded in the channel list. If you find a channel with new content, you can open it.
And Even if You Have More Than Five Channels
Even if someone can access more than five channels, the Discover feed might not be much good if only one or two of the channels are active because the only messages that end up in the feed will come from the active channels. Again, it’s often easier to check what’s going on in a small set of active channels.
No Real Interest from Me for Now
To be honest, I had forgotten that the Discover feed existed. It was only the appearance of MC1066160 that made me look at the feed again. Even in its new focused mode, I don’t think the feed will do much for me until Microsoft updates the Discover feed to support guests.
More information about the Discover feed is available in this Microsoft support article.
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