Forum is a Meta app dedicated to bringing your Facebook groups together into one feed

“Designed for groups you already love.” That’s what Meta is promising with Forum, a new app from the company, which it quietly launched on Friday. The app is only available on iPhones at the moment, and brings together all your Facebook groups into one feed.

It works like this: Assuming you belong to multiple groups on Facebook, the community collects posts from those groups, and displays them in your feed without any algorithmic recommendations or posts from friends. If you share a post to a group in your community feed, that post will appear in that group feed, and vice versa.

The app also has an AI feature called Ask, which can be accessed via a button to the right of the home button in the horizontal menu at the bottom. With Ask, you can search for something in all your groups instead of having to scroll around each group to find it.

“Your feed is built on conversations from groups,” Meta said. App store list. “See what real people are saying, not just what’s trending, and then easily pick up where you left off.”

To get the forum, download it from the App Store on your iPhone. The app will then ask you which Facebook account you want to connect to, and “your groups, profile and activity will be relayed,” Meta said in the listing.

Perhaps surprisingly, Meta didn’t advertise the forum on either of them Newsroom page Or on her X account. Social media consultant matt navarra discovered that the app has been launched and Posted about this topic on threadsSaying that the forum feels very similar to Reddit, with its focus on “real people” in the forum feed.

A spokesperson told CNET only: “We’re testing a lot of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful for their experiences across our apps.”

I tried Forum myself — first, I downloaded the app from the App Store on my iPhone and then opened the app. I connected using my Facebook account, and then the forum integrated all my groups – my regular Facebook feed, Marketplace, Buy Nothing group, etc. In the app settings, you can manage your existing groups, discover new groups or create a new group from scratch.

At the top of the feed, the forum gave me some guidelines for getting started:

• Ask anything: Get answers, tips and information from various groups.
• Organize your feed: Tell us what interests you and your feed will follow.
• Everything is in sync: Your Facebook groups and activity are reflected as well, so you can use the community without missing anything.

I checked my forum feed. There were posts about the 49ers and Warriors (my favorite teams), items for sale, and posts from friends on my regular Facebook account. It took me a while to redirect myself toward bringing all of these collections together into one feed, but it resulted in deleting a lot of extraneous posts that I didn’t want or need.