In June 2018, we're making changes to the native social capabilities in SharePoint Online

wbaer 's announcement started making more sense when perspective's broadened to include content aggregation in hub sites & Teams as Mark-Kashman  notes in this thread. *Really* clicked for me when I read Mark's update last week:

"SharePoint news updates in Office 365, including Microsoft Teams integration"

These points in particular:

• "Create news from SharePoint home in Office 365"
• "From the SharePoint home in Office 365, simply click Create news and choose where you wish to publish your news, starting with a list of frequent and followed sites. Once you choose the site, you’re taken directly to the news authoring canvas for that site. Give it a title, add your content from an ever-expanding set of web parts, and start making news!"

Mark's and Bill's announcements would've been paired in an ideal world. But Deleted 's a big company!

In preparing for a hub sites presentation to the Austin Office 365 & SharePoint User Group last week, Microsoft's roadmap for 1-to-many, & many-to-many social, became clearer. Using new & improved modern web parts, content rollup is super easy & flexible. And -- in my view --  a key to the hub site strategy. Relying on SharePoint home page news feed? Well, real estate and control are limited. (My guess? Part of this *might* be based on telemetry indicating low engagement.) Create a Hub Site instead, and drop in a News web part aggregating news within the hub and across site collection boundaries. Want more control? Take a look at the updated Highlighted Content web part. Name's a bit of a misnomer. Unexpectedly powerful and granular for all types of SP artifacts: news, documents, keywords. Kind of like a modernized Content Query Web Part. Found I preferred using Highlighted Content for news rollup. Better UX and control for site owner; more flexible display options for users.

For me, the deep dive into hub sites -- coupled with Mark's update last week -- painted the greener pastures ahead, minimizing the pain of deprecating SP home page news feed. At least for those using Office 365/SharePoint Online.