If I read the Facebook help info correctly (i.e. I haven’t actually tried seeing what happens when I stick someone in that list) everyone already has such a list. It is called “Restricted” and anyone you put in that list can only see info you have designated “Public”.
I said a dummy account, not a fake account. Everyone has multiple email addresses right? A main one, one to direct spammers to, and any other addresses you might need that you don’t want coming to your regular account?
If I could go back in time, I would still start a Facebook account, but I’d keep my Friends list restricted to much fewer people - either people I desperately wanted to stay in contact with or people I am very close to. As it stands, I have so many acquaintances as Friends and people I went to high school with and other stuff that a lot of the time spent there is just wasted. Now I have all these pseudo-attachments to people I barely know, and I like them too much to defriend them.
So my advice is to come up with a list of like 10 people to add and stick to it. Unless you’re really into being constantly bombarded with political propaganda, photos of babies, and advertisements. Having such a low number of Friends will help prevent you from spending hours wasting time on Facebook.
The caveat to that advice is that doing things the way I did has led to some wonderful unexpected connections. Like a guy I’ve known since 4th grade who just randomly decided to become my virtual fitness Coach for free. Or my great uncle who lives in the south that I see maybe once every 5-10 years. Since being his Facebook friend I have discovered he is awesome and we now discuss science fiction and technology with on a regular basis.
Just realize that Facebook is about 80% bullshit and 20% things actually worth seeing.
They didn’t used to! Glad to know. Personally, I’d still make my own list because Facebook may decide to arbitrarily change how the “restricted” list is handled. The personal list/group feature has been around in different iterations for years, but the pre-made “restricted” list thing is fairly recent. I’d be worried about Facebook changing it or nixing it since it’s one of their official lists - like when there used to be an official “best friends” group that facebook wanted you to use. That disappeared and all those folks went back into my regular friends pool. Wouldn’t want that to happen with something as sensitive as a restricted person.
ETA: Facebook is 80% bullshit if your friends’ interests are 80% bullshit. Facebook’s content is only as good as your friends are. Of course, you addressed that by saying only friend people you’re actually interested in communicating with, but only friending 10 people is rather small. As you said, there’s plenty of good communications Facebook opens up if you give it a chance.
There might be friends you have who seem normal, but do many silly games on Facebook. But fortunately, you can change settings to never show updates from specific games. There might be a setting to never show any updates from any games, but I guess I haven’t found it because still occasionally Facebook will say a friend is playing a game or reached some new level. But it’s not a frequent bother for me.
If someone does do frequent political posts or other annoying things, you can change the settings on how often you see updates from them, or that you’ll only see “Important Updates.” I haven’t quite figured out what Facebook thinks is important or not, but that’ll cut down on how many of their political posts you’ll see.
You can block entire game producers, which is great. The few friends I have that play games tend to stick to one or two developers, so two or three clicks later, and I haven’t seen a single game update in years.
All you really need to know boils down to two things:
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Never count on anything you ever put on the internet staying secret from anyone
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You don’t have to put anything on the internet that you don’t want to put there
As mentioned before keep everything private and stick to a couple of people in your friends list, other wise you’ll get a bunch of stuff about Farmville or other Facebook games, for most people it’s a 4:1 ratio of bullshit and stuff they care about.
As soon as you friend someone (I mean once you’ve both agreed to be friends) go to their page/timeline. Point to the “[checkmark] Friends” button at the top. It’ll open a menu. Click “Settings…” Uncheck “Games” and “Comments and Likes” (unless you really want to see all the stuff your friends comment on and likes…but probably not).
This will instantly make your Facebook experience a whole lot better.
If and when a game notification does come up on your newsfeed, mouse over it and click on the white arrow that comes up in the upper right-hand corner. Click “Hide…” Then it will be hidden and replaced with a notice on your newsfeed something like “This thing was hidden. Hide all notices from [NAME OF GAME?]” - Click on that. You’ll slowly start hiding all game notices that are creeping through the previous setting I described above.
If you start to have problems with a friend that is posting too much or whatever, go back to that “[checkmark] Friends” button on their page as I outlined in the first paragraph. Click “Settings…” to “tone them down” a bit more, as it were.