Likewise, Facebook has become spectacularly useless for me. I've missed important moments in friend's lives for several days because Facebook has decided that shoving random fan pages and adverts are what I actually want to see.
A friend's dad died and I didn't know for 5 days. He was busy dealing with everything that comes with such a major life event, posted it to facebook assuming that would be an effective way to communicate it.
I just did a quick tally. Of the first 26 posts in my feed:
* 11 friends/page/groups
* 15 groups/pages that I haven't followed or interacted with.
Of those, the first post was a friend, the next 5 posts were groups or pages I haven't interacted with. It also shoved reels at me 3 times, further delaying me seeing the content I actually want to see.
Of those 11 posts from people I did specifically try to follow on FB, only 2 were from today (not sure if folks just haven't posted).
One of the posts from a friend was from 6 days ago that has never popped up in my feed before. What's notable to me about that delay is that I saw and interacted with a more recent post of theirs this morning. So I guess they've jumped up in priority in "the algorithm", so now it finally decides to show me it.
Of course, continuing in the grand tradition of "Facebook WTF", I went to scroll back up the feed to look for other signal and it's all gone. It doesn't even reliably show me my wife's feeds. (plus it does have that amazing feature where it'll give me a notification that she just posted/commented on something on facebook, and even lies about the time/date of posting until you refresh the page, while she's literally fast asleep beside me.)
I see posts from my friends all the time. Most of the post in my feed are from friends or groups I follow.