Reintroduce friend list searching, sorting and filtering

This is a reworded version of my duplicate bug-report found here given that this was since confirmed as intended behaviour by a staff member.

As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to find particular users which I have friended on my friends list, whether by name or status.

A recent update removed both the status + alphabetical sorting of friends and the search-box / filter dropdown seen on the friends page. This has made it significantly more difficult for me to find my friends as now I either need to paginate through every page hoping I don’t end up missing them; or search for them via the user search bar (wasting several minutes as I fail to spell their username correctly). This change was also since confirmed as intended behaviour here.

To add onto this, if said friend has ended up unfriending me for one reason or another, I will be left on a wild goose-chase trying to find them on my friends list thinking I have missed them over and over again. This change has also made it impossible (without the use of an external tool or experience) to determine which of my friends are currently in-experience / online at a glance. This change (which is seemingly a temporary change while the friends system moves over to pagination) isn’t ideal for me and I can only assume many other users who use the search / filter options fairly regularly.

If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because I would more efficiently be able to find particular users which I am looking for on my friends list without needing to waste time trying to either remember their whole username (and spelling of it) or going through my whole friends list in the hopes I won’t end up missing them.

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This is a bad change. No idea who decided to say “let’s make it less useful!” and just removed. search bar. Either that or allow to search something like “is:friend pyx” into the normal search bar. This could be better so we can have is:following is:follower etc

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This thread has a little discussion about the recent changes (including replies from an engineer):
https://x.com/LukasThePickle/status/1834671298691145794

Notably:
https://x.com/c0re0s/status/1834674979004465432

They plan to make the page sort your own friends by the ones you interact with most, and sort others’ friends by the ones they most recently added.

Some progress was seemingly made on this, most notably the reintroduction of searching via the https://friends.roblox.com/v1/users/{userId}/friends/search endpoint; however the speed of this operation is less than to be desired (>1 second response time every time the search field is edited from my personal searches) and sorting + filtering is still not yet supported.

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