We tried using Discourse’s Unified New page as the homepage because it appeared to offer exactly the feed we wanted. With a plugin that removes posts from /new when the user scrolls past the viewport. ( @Don got this working)
The confusion came from the fact that I’ve always tested Discourse using an established, logged-in account, so my Unified New page was always full of posts. I hadn’t fully understood how it worked for brand-new users.
After creating a new test account, we discovered that Unified New was completely empty because older topics weren’t considered “new” for that user. That means it can’t currently provide the populated homepage feed we had planned.