I actually took this a step further and un-followed all of my friends. It took me more than a few hundred clicks, but Facebook now shows me a completely empty news feed. There's no ads either, although I'm not sure if that's because of uBlock Origin or if it's because there's not enough posts to stick ads in-between.
As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...
At that point, why not just use (Facebook) Messenger and stop using the main website altogether? Messenger gives you the benefit of a Rolodex without subjecting you to the normal feed. Facebook did a pretty good job of cleaning up bloat from Messenger recently too.
Google contacts has the downside of inserting everyone’s birthday into my calendar. I can’t remove a birthday from a contact once Google knows it. Super annoying and a dumb example of trying to use shared cloud data instead of my locally curated contacts list.
As soon as there's another service I can use as a modern Rolodex, I'll be using that instead. I think most people only have an account for this reason...