like "Only closed diffs", or "No commits", or "Only items with a comment".
(Two cases where I find myself wishing for this these days are (1) stalking closing diffs, to early-detect possible conflicts with my custom changes, and (2) following the wikimedia discussion, for no practical reason.)
For (1), can you use the Audit -> All Commits view? That shows all commits across all repositories (or some subset of repositories, if you prefer) chronologically:
https://secure.phabricator.com/audit/query/all/
Alternatively, you could maybe use Differential -> Closed, ordered by updated?
https://secure.phabricator.com/differential/query/BU_Py4ClShYW/#R
(2) seems reasonableish and we don't have a great alternative for it, but one approach might be just making comments stand out more (T4057 is related somewhat), and making some of the fluff comments (like "closed by commit" and "merged task") into real transactions (T3686).
There are also some transaction groups (like updated commits + closed task implicitly) which should be combined in feed but currently are not.
I didn't think about Audit for (1) - I think I'll switch to it, thanks (I currently use Differential->Closed, but that also brings up old diffs that have new comments, like D212).
We might also start tracking "Closed Date" explicitly (see T4434). There isn't a super strong driving use case for it, but there are a lot of little nice-to-haves like this. I think a lot of the motivation in T4434 was similar.
I'm going to close this task since I think most of this stuff is reasonably well covered elsewhere -- I'll make a note about it on T4434 though.