Probably not what you want to hear, but a "feeds" table would be a great middleman for this sort of transaction, giving you a denormalized way of pivoting to all these data with a polymorphic relationship.
You could build it like this:
<?php
Schema::create('feeds', function($table) {
$table->increments('id');
$table->timestamps();
$table->unsignedInteger('user_id');
$table->foreign('user_id')->references('id')->on('users')->onDelete('cascade');
$table->morphs('target');
});
Build the feed model like so:
<?php
class Feed extends Eloquent
{
protected $fillable = ['user_id', 'target_type', 'target_id'];
public function user()
{
return $this->belongsTo('User');
}
public function target()
{
return $this->morphTo();
}
}
Then keep it up to date with something like:
<?php
Vote::created(function(Vote $vote) {
$target_type = 'Vote';
$target_id = $vote->id;
$user_id = $vote->user_id;
Feed::create(compact('target_type', 'target_id', 'user_id'));
});
You could make the above much more generic/robust—this is just for demonstration purposes.
At this point, your feed items are really easy to retrieve all at once:
<?php
Feed::whereIn('user_id', $my_friend_ids)
->with('user', 'target')
->orderBy('created_at', 'desc')
->get();