My memory of the first version of Facebook was that it too didn't have a feed. I have fond memories of having to visit all my friends manually to see what they were up to in the last day. This made me more conscious of who I was thinking of and who I wanted to see the most. A side effect was seeing the comments of other people who were commenting about my friends updates, and then naturally diving into their profile pages. This changed dramatically following the introduction of the timeline.

[EDIT]: I personally believe that humanity has been conditioned to expect, perhaps even crave, a timeline/feed based social network, and therefore a non-feed based social network will be up against a general "expectation" of what a social network is by the populace. This expectation is driven in part by an "addictive" feeling that networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat have fostered over the past decade.

The newsfeed was added later. They integrated it from a company they bought. I almost quit Facebook when it was added. In retrospect, it was so much better than what we have now. It has an end, was in chronological order, wasn't filled with spam and propaganda

The feed has been a hinderance to groups. So many people asking the same questions because you can't find the posts where they've been answered over and over.

FriendFeed! It was great. Pre-facebook you could build a feed using RSS from all your sources or comments off other sites. It was chronological and it excluded any algorithms. - If you subscribed to your friend feeds all the data slid into a chronological feed on your main site. It was the best, initially FB kept most of these features but in the end slowly killed them.

People thought the news feed was creepy. A bunch of interactions on the site that users considered semi private or like something you needed to visit the page to see -- like writing on a friend's wall -- suddenly generated stories on the feed which would be shown proactively. Many facebook users felt this was a bad change.

Especially since Facebook's game from the beginning of the feed was clearly and openly user manipulation for profit, with the aim of expanding to encompass all of a user's monetizable activities on the web, whether inside or outside of facebook e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Beacon

This is from the beginning. Wikipedia characterizes the Beacon episode with: "In general, Beacon was viewed as a mistake because it appeared to be too explicit about the intentions inscribed in its protocol."

For me visiting peoples profiles was much more addictive than the feed. I think it is a bit like the slot machine phenomenon, where you do something repeatedly and you can never be certain if there is some reward or not. Facebook (or national alternatives like StudiVZ) were great because almost all of your peers were there (StudiVZ means literally student's directory - when I first heard about it I thought it was something official). Especially if you were an introvert it was great to look up people in your social circle and to connect.

Feeds on the other hand feel tedious. In the end, Facebook felt more and more like work and less rewarding.

Community forums were huge in Brazil, they were one of the main reasons people used the website. They were so much better with actual paginated discussions instead of the mess that are Facebook continuous threads, a simple timeline instead of algorithmic blackboxes and encouraged actual discussion instead of self-promotion like the current social networks.

Such a shame that we all jumped on the Facebook bandwagon.

"You had to manually visit user pages if you were looking for something. Also, user pages had no "blog space" for posts, just main description" I mean, this sounds exactly like Friendster. And then MySpace.

And The Facebook. Even the wall wasn’t there at launch. You had some form fields to fill out, a picture, and that was it.

I agree, but I think it depended on the community. Some communities had very active forums and others were barren.

This is not something negative, some communities were just some witty or funny title and others to have genuine discussions.

For most users, communities were just another way to describe yourself, as the list of communities you were in was public. For instance, the community with most members was "I hate waking up early" (Eu odeio acordar cedo). That's a useless community, there's nothing to discuss in it.

You could find very active communities about every imaginable subject, it was super useful just like Reddit, but in a typical flat view internet forum and, most important: in Portuguese.

In the last days of orkut, when all the users looking for the "social" thing moved to Facebook and Twitter, all the activity was in communities because still today there's nothing like that.

After the end, some communities just disappeared, some migrated to own solutions like php forums and some, mainly football related, moved to VK, the Russian Facebook, which also has community forums almost exactly like orkut. I believe that 95% of activity in VK discussion boards are Brazilians, Russiand don't use that feature.