Move Facebook friends to acquaintance list for less news feed posts
If your Facebook news feed is filling up daily with posts from friends that you are not really that much in contact with, if at all, you may want to do something about it to give messages from friends that you care about more exposure in your feed. While you could do that manually by going through the list of friends on Facebook to move friends to the list of acquaintances or restricted friends, Facebook may help you out with the initial sorting.
All you need to do is visit the friend's organizer page on Facebook to have the site go through your list of friends to suggest friends that you have not interacted with lately. You can move some, all or none of the friends to the list of acquaintances.
Acquaintances are still friends but posts made by them will show up rarely in your news feed. You can also post messages that only friends, but not acquaintances, see.
Facebook in the first step looks at people in smart lists, and then in a second step at all of your friends on the site. Smart lists are automatic lists of friends based on common parameters such as location, job or school.
Please note that Facebook only lists about 30 of your friends per page, and that you need to click on the include link at the bottom to display all suggestions on the page.
The built-in tool is a little known feature that Facebook makes available to all of its users. If you think that your news feed is flooded with posts by friends that you are not that interested in, you may want to give it a try to reduce the number of news items that you have to browse through on the social networking site. This has the added benefit that it becomes less likely that you will miss an important update by a friend you are interested in or in contact with.
You can manually move friends to the list of acquaintances or restricted users with a click on the friends symbol on the friend's profile page and the selection of add to another list from the context menu. (found at Caschy)
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Thanks for the tip Martin. I wish their mobile apps would recognize all the changes I make on the regular website. I’ve taken people out of my news feed and I still see their junk on mobile. I don’t want to unfriend them because they’re family, but I don’t want to see their stream of inane drivel either. One thing for certain, FB is much harder to use from a mobile device. Mobile seems to be better for monitoring than actual use.
You are welcome. This certainly sounds really strange. Why would they maintain different data sets?
I don’t think it is different data sets. I think their mobile app is broken. It works fine in the browser.
hi, how can i get to friend organizer page the “normal” way (without clicking direct link on this page)?
i can’t find the way do that via facebook settings..
I do not know a way to open it directly from a Facebook menu or help file.
That seems to be a (bad) design trend for them. Configuration options are now scattered throughout the app rather than in their options pages. FB just keeps getting more and more confusing and difficult to use. I’m wondering how bad it will have to get before people go elsewhere?
What if you want to move friends back to your news feed and out of acquaintances?
Jon – Like your question. I hope someone does me that favor. Feeling a bit rejected….