It is what people wanted though, from Facebook. Most people, including you and I, connect with friends through DMs in various apps, WhatsApp, or an equivalent group chat messenger (iMessage, etc.)

Facebook has become a lot like TikTok because that's what people want from an app that has a feed. We, en masse, don't engage with a feed of just our friends' posts (FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage). When we open a feed-based app, we want the long doomscroll. I do think your restaurant analogy is apt. I mean nutritious food is healthier for people, but a miniscule number of restaurants serve such a thing, and none do which aren't trying to fill a small niche in the market

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

I've never seen this, despite frequently being irritated with Facebook mainly showing me random shit I don't care about.

Companies always squirrel away the "works correctly" button and then are like whelp nobody is using the thing we hid! Nothing we can do!

> FB actually has a friend's feed which gets relatively little usage

Because everything about the Facebook user interface discourages its use.

What if, and I know this is craaaaazy, the friend feed was just the feed? Facebook was growing fine with that.

> it is what people wanted though, from Facebook.

I doubt that. In my entourage, Facebook was always thought as a social hub for internet presence. Like maintaining a web site, but with less tediousness. So you fill it up with personal details, then share happenings with your friends. And just like an hub, it's the entry way for more specific stuff, like messenger for DM, groups for social activities, pages for personal or business activities. The feed was just a way to get updates for stuff that's happening around you.

> It is what people wanted though, from Facebook

Facebook used to provide a good experience of staying in loose touch with people I didn't know well enough to have ongoing conversations with. It was nice to know roughly what was going on with people, and if something big happened (like a kid, a new job, a death) I would see it and could reach out with congratulations or condolences.

But some people posted every meal and cup of coffee, and others only posted occasionally, and Facebook decided to bury the occasional posters and promote the high-engagement users instead. That's when Facebook became more bad than good for me, and I left.

If we could go back in time to that point, and prioritize posts in inverse relation to the poster's frequency instead, I'd use that service.