After being a fairly heavy FB user since 2005, in 2012 I decided to remove all of the 400+ Facebook pages I followed after it dawned on me that it was the sourc

After being a fairly heavy FB user since 2005, in 2012 I decided to remove all of the 400+ Facebook pages I followed after it dawned on me that it was the source of a lot of my news feed garbage. After deleting about 100 pages from my list of followed pages, I notice the last 10 would re-appear. Every 50 or so pages I'd delete from my list -- which to begin with is a purposefully slow and painful UX whether done manually or javascriptically -- 5 or more pages would reappear. It took a while to realize what was happening because it wasn't always 5 or 10, sometimes it was 2 or 4 and the time between occurrences was sometimes so long that I originally assumed I just missed some. Then I noticed some pages got re-listed after a day or so. This got me pretty upset but it was only the beginning. I began making it a daily mission to delete at least 50 pages a day and keep deleting them as often as they came back. It was at this point when pages stopped reappearing and I'd get an alert from the app that went something like "Hey (stop sign emoji) stop! You shouldn't be doing that!" and a bunch of lines about how I'm using the app in a way that's not meant to be, and some vague noise about continuing in such a way may lead to repercussions to functionality and/or my account. What? I'm not supposed to use the delete button on the Pages Followed (or whatever) pop out list? After ignoring these warnings and deleting as much as I could, one day I found the delete functionality would just stop working after deleting 20 or so pages, if at all. My frustration led to me pausing my account for a month or so, then reactivating when I felt motivated to delete more pages until again the functionality would either be limited or completely impossible. Finally I paused my account for 4 years until 2016 when I found I got delete all followed Pages. I was so happy about this I started using FB daily again but not nearly as much as I used to. Funnily enough the same thing happened to me in 2021 on Instagram when I tried to unfollow accounts. That said I've always thought FB had/has the potential to be a public utility as a local-first product. Like, families should have an FB. Your street or the floor of your building should have a FB. Neighborhoods should have a FB.It doesn't even necessarily need to be ad-free, just community oriented. I suppose that's Mastadon's intention but FB does it best IMHO