Facebook has become a bit of an eternal timesink. I don't really have time to spend scrolling through all the third party ads, clickbait and irrelevant content just to find the occasional post by someone I actually know.
I predict within five years I'll be using their VR and AR Meta gear but not their terrible excuse for a social media platform.
The main content feed is useless, there's so much I don't want to see, and if I want to keep up with everyone, I have to go to their individual pages to guarantee I see everything, because Facebook only shows everything from about 20 of your friends and then odd posts from everyone else, so I also can't guarantee that everyone sees everything I post either, because of this.
It's so bad I'm spending time on twitter, but that's not exactly a replacement, though interestingly it could be. Plans for 4000 character posts with bold and italic styling are a move in that direction.
Now, if they implement a way to have a circle of private friends that see a different set of posts from your public ones it would signal a death knell for Facebook. If I'm spending more time on Twitter than Facebook, other people are too.
While Twitter has the same problem Google plus had, namely that I can't convince my FB friends to go there, it isn't a fatal problem for the platform because it's successful focus is on public tweets and discussion, so even a failure to turn it into a rival to FB won't lead to the same fate as G+
Elon Musk might still have an Ace up his sleeve, and a way to recover his investment if he's thinking in this direction.
But until/unless a big player makes a move like that, I'm faced with fixing this by myself. Somehow.
I would like to figure out a convenient way to see everyone's updates, as they appear. That would be awesome.
I was looking at the page of a relative and realising Facebook hadn't showed me any of their posts for months. I think FB decides you only need to see an arbitrary number of posts from people you know, and then it's a free for all for advertisers, presumably if they showed you all your friend's posts, you wouldn't have time to see the ads.
Facebook has limited options for dealing with this. I've unfollowed the odd person who shitposts 100 times a day, and even asked to stop seeing posts by certain advertisers, there are only so many times I can watch people breaking records for how much they can eat in one sitting. But, a lot of the clickbait advertisers use a different ID each time, or there's just 100's of them, I don't know.
If I could reduce the posts to 60% friends and 40% advertisers I'd be happier, 80-20 would be ideal, but I even see the same posts from certain friends over and over again, and nothing from others who are posting regularly.
Twitter is different I think, as it's not so ad driven - the problem there is that 20% of users are commenting or posting so often it drowns out the 80% who are posting interesting stuff once a day or less.
I very much doubt FB would allow anything too user-focused. Their business model clearly depends on selling space in the main feed, otherwise they'd just be happy with side ads.
I did try ways of getting feeds from individual friend's pages so you could just browse updates from them, using something like an rss reader, but any attempts to get custom streams of data from Facebook have been shut down.
The only viable way to do it would be to build a web-scraper using python and existing libraries that browse and appear to be a browser, logged in as you.
Problems with that:
1. You couldn't really share it with anyone, you might get away with using it from one account, you definitely wouldn't be able to distribute an app that did this.
2. FB might still detect the weird browsing patterns, opening up all your friends individual feeds from a single IP might cause them to block those requests.
3. You'd have to parse the data, and update the parser if they changed the structure.
As far as developing something goes, my choices are:
A. Build a whole new UI for FB that's user focused rather than advertiser focused.
or
B. Build a whole new replacement for FB.
Weirdly, B would be easier as they wouldn't be able to shut it down.
I will let you all know if I get anywhere with that.