"Built for the groups you already love." That's what Meta is promising with Forum, a new app from the company, which it quietly launched on Friday. Only available on iPhones for now, the app brings together all of your Facebook groups into a single feed.
It works like this: Assuming you belong to several Facebook groups, Forum brings together posts from those groups, surfacing them in your feed without any algorithmic recommendations or posts from friends. If you make a post to a group in your Forum feed, that post will appear in that group feed, and vice versa.
The app also has an AI feature called Ask, accessed by a button to the right of the home page button at the horizontal menu at bottom. With Ask, you can search for something across all your groups instead of having to scroll around each one to find it.
"Your feed is built around conversations from groups," said Meta in the App Store listing. "See what real people are saying, not just what's trending, and easily jump back in where you left off."
To get Forum, download it from the App Store on your iPhone. The app will then ask which Facebook account you want to connect with, and "your groups, profile and activity carry over," Meta said in the listing.
Perhaps oddly, Meta did not announce Forum on either its newsroom page or on its X account. Social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted that the app had launched and posted about it on Threads, saying the Forum appears very similar to Reddit, with its emphasis on "real people" in the Forum feed.
A spokesperson told CNET only: "We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps."
I tried Forum out for myself -- first, downloading the app from the App Store on my iPhone and then opening the app. I connected using my Facebook account, and then Forum integrated all of my groups -- my regular FB feed, Marketplace, a Buy Nothing group, and so forth. In the app's settings, you're able to manage your current groups, discover new ones or create a new one from scratch.
At the top of the feed, Forum gave me some pointers to get started:
- Ask anything: Get answers, advice and info from across groups.
- Curate your feed: Tell us what you care about and your feed will follow.
- Everything is in sync: Your groups and activity are reflected on Facebook too, so you can use Forum without missing a thing.
I checked out my Forum feed. There were posts about the 49ers and Warriors (my favorite teams), items for sale, posts from friends on my regular Facebook. It took a bit of time to reorient myself to having all those groups clustered together in one feed, but it did cut out a lot of extraneous posts that I didn't want or need.
