It was just never clear who I was sharing with. At least on a private chat there's a list of users and that's it.

That was intentional. I recall testing this out every time there was a new "oops, we're sorry, we reset your privacy settings to default -- AGAIN".

The privacy settings were carefully designed to have vague wording that how they worked on the surface wasn't how they really worked. Each and every one of them which had a different functionality than what the wording suggested on its surface resulted in you sharing to a much wider audience than you thought you were.

I recall carefully testing it out with a burner account which my main was not friends with, and it consistently taking 2-3 tries to get the privacy settings back to where I wanted them to be.

I would take those days over what Facebook is today - which is to say, useless. The only thing I use it for is groups, which have the good sense to only be about the thing you want to learn about when you look at the group. Still though - it is sad that FB Groups killed off small web forums.

Definitely true, but back in the day that was sort of the fun of it -- similar to putting up an AOL Instant Messenger away message, it was just... a blast of a funny thought to the people that you knew.

Over time, that network got stale and it included "people you sort of used to know", and then it included your grandma and uncle and rest of the world. There are few things that are at the intersection of the Venn diagram of "things I want to share with all of those people", especially as I get older.