Was it? In Facebook’s early days you actually followed your friends and only saw their content. There wasn’t even an algorithm until a few years in when they stopped showing the feed chronologically. It wasn’t perfect but it was largely just an extension of your IRL social life.
Getting into the limits of my memory here, but as far as I recall, early Facebook didn't have a feed at all, chronological or otherwise. It was just a directory of students at your own school, skeuomorphic to the physical "facebook" that universities would hand out each semester to students on campus, which gave you a headshot of everyone along with their room numbers. At some point, they added an updateable "status" field to the profiles, to tell your friends how you were feeling that day or what you were doing or whatever. When they started showing those on the home page instead of just on the profiles, then there was a feed, which eventually transformed into the monster we see today.
But early on, it was just a digital phonebook with headshots and exactly equivalent to physical items that schools already distributed.
Yes. Early FB was a completely different application and pretty similar to MySpace.