A social networking system presents a viewing user with a newsfeed of stories describing actions performed by other social networking system users. In particular, the social networking system provides a pre-fetched set of newsfeed stories to a user device of the viewing user and a presentation order for the stories. The social networking system does not “lock” the set of newsfeed stories or the presentation order. The user device locally stores the pre-fetched ranked set of newsfeed stories upon receipt. When the viewing user later requests presentation of newsfeed stories, the user device retrieves the set of newsfeed stories and presents, to the viewing user, stories from the set according to the presentation order. A request is also sent to the social networking system to “lock” the presented newsfeed stories and the order in which the newsfeed stories were presented.