New mayors, captains and governors show up in the feed
A seat changes hands quietly today. You fly three days over Hamburg, the city reaches tier II for you, and you become its mayor. Your bell rings. Nobody else hears about it unless they open the mayors page and look.
That's backwards. A new mayor is exactly the kind of thing the rest of the pilots should see, because it tells them two things at once: seats are real, and someone is actively flying for them. So from today a change of holder writes a line into the live feed and a post into the Discord #live-feed channel.
What the line says
The feed line reads like the others around it: the pilot's face and name, a crown, "became mayor of", and the place. Captains get the airport, governors get the region. If the place has its own page, the name links to it: the city landing, the airport page or the region page. If it doesn't, the name is plain text instead of a link to nowhere.
The Discord post is a single line with a link to the same page. It goes through the same relay as the other community posts, with the same spacing between posts and the same daily cap, so a busy evening of seat changes cannot flood the channel.
When it fires
Only when a seat really changes hands. The recount that decides the holder runs after every recorded visit and once an hour, and almost every time it confirms the holder who is already there. Those runs write nothing. The line appears once, when somebody new takes the seat, either an empty one or one they won from the previous holder.
Losing a seat stays private. The person who lost it gets a bell with who took it and by how many days, as before. Announcing a loss to everyone would turn the feed into a scoreboard of who got beaten, and that's not something anyone asked for.
Who is named
The same rule as the mayors page. A seat can only go to a pilot with a public handle who hasn't hidden their visits, so a hidden pilot never holds a seat and never appears in the line. Villages that only exist on OpenStreetMap don't take part in the race, so they don't show up here either.
The feed rows also skip the baked city landings, the same way visit rows do: those pages only understand arrivals, builds and spawns, and would print a new mayor as an arrival. On the site the line lives in the live feed, in the feed tab of the in-game chat panel, and under the People filter.
If you want to see your own name there, the race for the seat explains how many days you need and where you stand.