It's difficult to rank all the content that is posted on Facebook - filtering by time is one easy pivot, but IMO it becomes difficult to pull the signal out (I find twitter to be a torrent of data I can't keep up with).

The upside is that time is an easy pivot to understand, and if someone close to you posts something and immediately asks you "do you see my post?", it's trivial to answer with confidence.

It would be nice if Facebook exposed controls to allow users to sort their news feed - by time and by whatever other metrics they're currently using.

Facebook's editorial control of users' posting is the natural consequence of you having way too many people in your circle of friends. Average FB user has how many - 100 friends? 500 friends? If Facebook showed you all updates from everyone, as well as the large mass of fanpages you've subscribed to, you'd drown in the noise.

The point being, any usable social network will have to filter user postings.

I've got fewer than 100 "friends" and there are a few whose posts don't show up in my newsfeed. I think their algorithm for showing what people post is fundamentally broken.

Yes, I've gone through the "like/follow/show all posts" dance several times.

I did the dance too, initially, but quickly got used to the new model. I have > 500 friends, so the chronological show-all model would seriously degrade the utility of Facebook (though I am annoyed when I accidentally refresh the feed and lose the posts I only wanted to read).

It was a long time since I had < 100 friends, so I'm willing to believe the current model is broken for small amounts of Facebook relations.

"Just live with the way things are" has pretty much been my model for online services for many years now. It's the only way I can maintain some amount of sanity.