Live friends land in your sidebar
Your sidebar now shows up to three people you follow who are streaming right now, each one click from the stream. When nobody's live, it vanishes.
You're reading a thread, glance right, and there it is. It's a small card headed Live now, with red rings around the avatars and a tiny LIVE tag on each one. Name, @handle, an arrow. Click, and the stream opens in a new tab, with no trip to your Following tab and no scrolling.
Credit goes to richardkeep, who wired the sidebar to your follow list. The lookup keeps only people whose stream end time is later than the moment of the lookup and who have a platform and a link. It drops anyone you mute, anyone you block, and anyone blocking you, then takes three at random. The card itself throws away anything that stopped being live between the query and the page, and shows nothing at all, not even a header or gap, when the list comes back empty.
One catch. Random order means the three shuffle every time you load a page, so with six friends streaming you get a different trio each visit and two regulars always miss the cut. There's no way to pin a favorite or page through the rest.