Meta Launches Forum, a New App for Facebook Groups with a Custom Algorithm

Meta quietly launched a new Forum app on iOS yesterday. It’s a new way to access Facebook Groups, one of the most popular Facebook features.

Forum also aims to provide a better Groups experience than the main Facebook app, and it allows users to post with a nickname. Forum users can also customize the algorithm to surface topics of interest, which is something that’s quite unprecedented on Meta’s social platforms.

You may remember that Meta previously launched a standalone Facebook Groups mobile back in 2014, but it was discontinued three years later. This new Forum app is different, however. It offers AI-powered features for summarizing responses across different groups, eliminating the need for users to manually look for releveant messages. Groups admins are also getting access to a new admin AI assistant that can help them to manage their groups and moderate content.

Forum is currently exclusive to the iOS App Store, and it’s also only available in select markets. There’s no word yet about a potential Android release. “We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps,” a Meta Spokesperson‬ told social media consultant Matt Navara, who compared Forum to a mix of Reddit and the Q&A platform Quora.

For a while, Meta tried to turn Facebook into a “super app” that does everything. However, the company now seems tempted to unbundle its services, as it already did with its standalone Messenger app.

This is also visible on Instagram, which launched a new Edits video editing app last year that’s heavily inspired by ByteDance’s CapCut app. Last week, the Instagram team also launched Instants, which mimics Snapchat’s ephemeral photos.