Facebook friends lists: How do you compartmentalize your digital life?

I unfriend people if they're assholes. Otherwise I don't curate. As for lists, you're putting a lot of faith in Facebook the company leaving your lists alone. I had a handful of lists including one for my current city, which naturally is the list that sees the most action/interaction. Facebook nagged me for a while to do more with the other lists, but they remained static, so Facebook doesnt load the new posts in those lists anymore. It tells me there are no new posts and recommends that I add more people to them.

I make no distinctions along these lines. I just don't post anything I'm uncomfortable with people knowing. This is a conscious decision, not "I don't understand how to limit the audience of a post".Bonus question: do you have a personal policy for unfriending people?If Dude I Knew Decades Ago When We Were Children turns out to be a right-wing ideologue, I unfriend them rather than raise my blood pressure. Other than that, no; I don't really understand why I should periodically unfriend people like you're suggesting. There are a few people who are not right-wing ideologues whose posts I don't wish to see anymore; for example people who constantly spam LIKE THIS IF YOU THINK APPLES TASTE GOOD or HERE IS AN AWFUL AND DISTURBING PICTURE OF AN OBVIOUSLY ABUSED DOG ISN'T IT HORRIBLE and so forth. For such people, I just unfollow them, not unfriend them. Again, I don't really understand why I should unfriend them.

I consider everything I post on FB to be public or at least potentially public. So I don't have any lists. All my friends can see everything I post.

Well, first of all, I'm stubbornly filtering as to who I friend in the first place. I don't think most people actually notice -- there are plenty of people who just get on FB occasionally as it is. Most things I publish as public. A few things I make friends only. The main tool I use, since I'm not going to maintain oodles of lists, is the https://www.facebook.com/friends/organize. FB doesn't really publicize this but I think it's the only way to use the Acquaintances list, which is essentially a group of people who are Friends that you will see much less content from. (You can also publish to "Friends except Acquaintances". I find this way more rational than the Close Friends list, but that may work for you as well.) I continue to post a variety of stuff to FB, because it's the only social connection I have to most of my college friends and people who are local. I've been deliberately using Twitter more lately, even though there is virtually no local Twitter action. So it's a bit of a Venn diagram problem. Although it has some aggravating features, I also maintain a LinkedIn profile that I use for those "business card" connections. I don't use it as much that way as I'd like to, but it's again, my only connection to certain individuals.

I have a list of close friends which I'll post super-personal stuff to, another overlapping list that it's okay to post risque stuff to, and a list of local folks it would make sense to post stuff like "does anyone have a ladder I can borrow" or "vote for this guy for mayor" to. I also have a list of family that I sometimes want to exclude from certain posts. I don't have a system for unfriending people, I just do it if someone annoys me. I'm more likely to remove people from my news feed.

I use Facebook like your North American friends. I try not to post anything to Facebook that I wouldn't want to be Google-able if someone searched for my name. Even if a post is limited to a group of friends, I don't trust that I'll forget and lose track of Facebook's privacy settings. Things that are meant for a specific group of people are sent in private messages, or private events, but I assume a lower standard of confidentiality than e-mail. I also pretty much never defriend people. I sometimes unfollow them if they are offensive. I have way fewer friend requests than you, and even the people on my list I haven't talked to in years are generally people I wouldn't mind knowing generally what I am up to today.

My policy is: I don't post things that I am unwilling to show to my grandma or the President, and I don't friend anyone that I don't want to talk to regularly. Also, FB is my Happy Place and so I pretty ruthlessly curate it to stay like that. This sounds like the opposite of your approach but it works for me. So, for example, I'm private about the line between work and the rest of my life. I deal with this by not friending current coworkers. I don't friend people whose happiness I'm not invested in. I mostly don't friend people that I've known for less than 6 months or so. The short version is that I only friend Friends, not acquaintances or people that generally seem cool. I unfriend if someone no longer qualifies for the list above (so far this was one person clearly teaching her child disordered eating, one posting really awful jokes, and one person writing personal attacks about a relative of mine. So not often.) Friends that are generally cool but have a hobby horse that detracts from my Happy Place get muted. I do have a few geographical groups I've put together for posting something about a specific location, and a family group to post about upcoming family functions, but that's more about not wasting other people's time than any desire for privacy.

Several people I know have more than one fb account. One of my coworkers does this: one account is for family and close friends and the other is for everyone else, including the college students we both work with. I just have one account and the only students I let on it are all over 21 and I know them fairly well. I've ignored countless friend requests from various coworkers with whom I rarely interact.

@Flunkie: Not to thread-sit, but to clarify as to why I am interested in developing a unfriending policy (or at least a periodic assessment of privacy settings), and a system for limiting the audience of a post: I use Facebook to get to know new acquaintances. I'll meet a person while I'm on a trip, or talk to a friend of a friend in a party etc, and if it seems like there are subjects that we can discuss or we could see each other at a future event, we'll add each other to Facebook. I've been living in a new country for a year and have made most of my current network that way. It's like an informal way of exchanging business cards. Locally, it's strange if you refuse to add someone to Facebook, even if you barely know them. In fact, I've never heard of it happening. I easily have five new Facebook friends per week (whether they add me or I add them). Given time, some people become good friends, or just cool people within my broader circles, or strangers who I will probably never interact with again. I'd like my Facebook friends list to reflect my actual relationship to these individuals, and unfriend the people I end up not bumping into or interacting with for extended periods of time. I find that my local friends use Facebook for a variety of purposes. They mix work, personal, family news, and overwrought Live Journal blog-like entries about their health conditions and changing religious views and past family abuse and whatever. Not everyone is privacy-control literate, but that's just what they do. In contrast, my North American friends limit their Facebook status posts strictly to Instagram food photos, sanitized vacation photos, and memes from Twitter. My own intention for Facebook is closer to that mishmash of what locals do, but be a whole lot more intentional with limiting/setting audiences instead of just letting it all hang. Hopefully this gives my question more context. [/thread-sit]