My wife & I virtually live in FaceBook. We have really enjoyed & depended on it for connecting with old friends, schoolmates & family.
The bad thing about FB is it's determined stance on blasting us all with ads, trending topics & games.
Then came FB Purity, originally called FaceBook Purity, but now called Fluff Busting Purity or FB Purity, for short.
It's an add-on for all the popular browsers (which naturally excludes IE & Edge) which is highly parameterized to let you turn on/off the vast majority of FB 'features' that get in your way of having a nice, quiet, stress-less session with those you want to hear from.
I won't go into a lot of details, except to say you can virtually eliminate that nasty right hand column completely & make your timeline newsfeed expand across that area, so you never see it.
You can remove most of the categories & topics in the left column, so you don't have to scroll to get to the ones you want & use.
It' can be installed as a direct add-on, or it can be installed as a script under GreaseMonkey. The advantage of GreasMonkey is that on those occasions when FB makes a major change that can cause FB Purity to stop working, or work oddly, when installed as an add-on, it won't be affected as much when it's a GreaseMonkey script.
So, enough of that. The main point is, if it weren't for FB Purity, my wife & I would probably have abandoned trying to stay on FB, in it's natural state.
It's easy enough to try out & see if you like it. It's FREE. You can find it by just searching for 'FB Purity".