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.

All decisions based on numbers and vibes.

To be fair, the demise of the major BBS hosts / platforms + Reddit and then Discord was what killed off small web fora.

I remember Facebook group - somewhere in the early 2010s, the group feature disappeared. Years later, group appeared again and I had to re-apply to get back into the group. Perhaps group was killed to boost public sharing.