Facebook shuts down News Feed customization feature Friend List Feeds

Welp, they had a good run.

Facebook is doing away with Friend List Feeds, the customized news feeds that showed only posts from a group of Facebook humans of your choosing (plus, ya know, ads). According to TechCrunch, earlier this week, Facebook rolled out messages to some users that “Friend lists feeds will be going away soon,” and Facebook confirmed the change.

Here’s the full eulogy:

Friends list feed will be going away soon.

We’ll be making these friend list feeds unavailable on August 9, 2018, to focus on improving your main newsfeed experience. But don’t worry — you can still continue to create, edit, and share to your friend lists.

Facebook launched Friend Lists in 2009, and unveiled Smart Lists — which suggest and auto-fill lists based on networks like education or work experience — in 2011. Using the tool was a way to make your Newsfeed experience more customized and to avoid posts from people you’d rather not encounter.

What the change means is that Facebook is keeping the lists, just not the ability see posts from only the people in those lists. It’s either a push to show how these lists may be redundant, with Facebook’s new focus on “meaningful interactions” with family and friends for the News Feed. 

Or, it’s a move that just does away with a feature that people didn’t really use — TechCrunch points out that in 2011 Facebook said 95 percent of users hadn’t made a single list. Mashable has reached out to Facebook for more context on this decision.

But really, list feeds had a good run. 2009-2018? That’s a pretty long shelf-life for a tech product. So RIP, list feeds. May you’ll be more useful in the afterlife than you were in the Facebook-verse.