The new standalone app sits on top of Facebook Groups, adds an AI tab called “Ask” and an admin assistant, and arrives the same month Mark Zuckerberg told staff he and Chris Cox had discussed whether they could build 50 new apps.
Meta has released a new standalone app called Forum, without a launch event, a blog post, or much of a press push at all.
The product is built on top of Facebook Groups and is listed in the App Store as “a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about,” phrasing that does most of the work of telling you what Meta wants it to be: a Reddit, with a Facebook account attached.
The launch was first spotted by the social-media consultant Matt Navarra and reported by TechCrunch, with independent confirmation from Engadget and MacRumors. A Meta spokesperson told Engadget the product was still in testing:
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“We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps.”
Users sign in with their existing Facebook account, at which point their groups, profile and activity carry over. Posts can be made under a nickname, in the same way they can in the main Facebook app, although group administrators can still see real identities.
Anything posted on Forum shows up in the corresponding group on Facebook, and vice versa, so the product is less a separate network than a separate front door into the one Meta already has.
The feed is the differentiator. Where Facebook’s main timeline mixes friends, Pages, algorithmic suggestions and ads, Forum’s surfaces only conversations from groups a user is in, with prompts to discover others. Two AI features sit on top.
The first, “Ask,” lets users put a question to the app and receive an answer compiled from discussions across groups, sparing them the chore of searching one at a time.
The second is an admin assistant designed to help moderators run groups and handle moderation. Both are pitched as time-savers rather than as the product’s defining feature.
This is not Meta’s first standalone Groups app. The company shipped one in November 2014 and shut it down in 2017, for reasons it never made especially clear at the time.
The Reddit framing is also conspicuous given timing: Reddit went public in March 2024, has spent the past two years licensing its data to AI companies for training, and remains the closest thing the consumer internet has to a working community-discussion product at scale. A Facebook-flavoured competitor with an AI answer tab is, at minimum, a recognisable shape.
Forum is the second new Meta app in roughly a month. In late April, the company began testing Instants, a standalone Instagram companion for disappearing photos that borrows visibly from BeReal and Snapchat. Meta Edits, last year’s CapCut-shaped video editor, sits in roughly the same lineage.
That cadence is not an accident. The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Zuckerberg told staff in an internal Q&A that AI-driven efficiency was allowing Meta to build more products with smaller teams, and that he and chief product officer Chris Cox had discussed whether the company could ship 50 new apps.
He then talked himself partway back down: “Like, yeah probably. But we probably should start by doing a few before we just, like, ramp up trying to do 50 all at once.”
Forum is one of the few. Whether users want a separate app for their Facebook groups, with an AI tab attached, is the question the spokesperson’s testing line was designed not to answer. The 2014 Groups app suggests one historical data point. The fate of Instants, Edits, and whatever ships next will produce the rest.
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