Alas, the concept was never fleshed out and is all but buried and featureless.

Nope. They're shutting it down https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

That's the feature for viewing a separate feed per friend list. The basic functionality of creating friend lists and assigning them different privacy settings isn't going anywhere.

Okay, but we're specifically talking about only viewing a feed of certain folks here..

hmmm, I've been using it since it came out and still use it. Yes the UI is a little crap but basically every time you post there's a tiny drop down you can set which groups can see and which groups can't. It will stay on whatever you last chose.

Mine is set to "All Friends" except "DoNotShow" and there's about 3 people on my "DoNotShow" list.

Have also excluded family for a few posts.

It's not heavily promoted but it is there. You can view feeds of your Facebook friend lists, just like Google+. Bookmark those feeds and you are good to go.

They're shutting that feature down: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/09/facebook-is-shutting-down-...

> Erm, Facebook did implement something like this. Shortly after Google+ came out. You can still assign friends to different groups.

IIRC, Facebook never really promoted those features or tried to make them easy and intuitive to use. Recently they've also made changes to make them less useful.

It's sort of like difference between having a well-designed and usable feature or a similar feature that only exists to check off a checkbox.

They were easy and intuitive. Facebook didn't promote them for the same reason the circles in Google+ lacked traction: The majority of users didn't care and didn't want it.

>Shortly after Google+ came out.

I remember Facebook having it first; this blog post (https://jessicavitak.com/2011/09/01/facebooks-circles-how-to...) confirms that.