The funny thing about Facebook is that it's got a perfectly good social network in there, I think the only one that exists. In the menu is "Feeds" which is what you want. It only shows friends and followed things. If they made that the default when you go to facebook.com I don't think I'd have any complaints feature-wise, though an ad-free option would be nice. It's a genuine social network.

Of course, then there's the question of who decides how and what is moderated, and the question of who can access your data, and Facebook definitely leaves a lot to be desired in that area just in terms of Meta not being a particularly trustworthy entity to have control of those decisions.