Meta has quietly launched a new app called Forum, a Reddit-style platform focused on online communities and discussions. The standalone app separates Facebook Groups from the main Facebook experience and brings them into a dedicated feed built around threaded conversations, recommendations, and question-based posts. Users can reportedly import their existing Facebook Groups directly into Forum, while AI-powered tools help summarize answers and assist moderators. The launch comes as the Mark Zuckerberg-led firm looks to compete more aggressively in community-driven social media, where platforms like Reddit and Discord continue to grow.
The app appeared quietly on Apple’s App Store without a formal launch event or public announcement, showing the social media giant’s increasingly common strategy of soft-testing products before a global rollout. According to the App Store listing, Forum is described as ‘a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and the communities you care about’.
Unlike the traditional Facebook feed, which now combines Reels, ads, Pages, suggested content, and Marketplace posts, Forum is centered entirely around conversations happening inside groups. Users can browse discussions from joined communities in a cleaner feed, continue ongoing threads, ask for recommendations, and discover topic-based discussions similar to Reddit’s subreddit model.
Meta is heavily leveraging the massive scale of Facebook Groups to power the app from day one. Facebook itself still has more than 3 billion monthly active users globally, and millions of active Groups already exist across categories like gaming, fitness, technology, parenting, careers, education, local communities, photography, and niche hobbies. Forum automatically carries over a user’s existing Groups, profile details, and activity after Facebook login, allowing Meta to instantly create a populated community ecosystem without requiring users to rebuild networks from scratch.
AI is deeply integrated into Forum from launch. The app includes an ‘Ask’ feature that reportedly searches across multiple groups and compiles responses into quick AI-generated summaries, functioning almost like a crowdsourced answer engine. The social media behemoth has also added AI-powered moderation tools for administrators, helping them manage discussions, organize content, and maintain community standards more efficiently.
One of Forum’s most notable features is its identity structure. The platform reportedly allows users to post using nicknames instead of displaying their real Facebook identity publicly in every discussion. This is a major shift from Facebook’s long-standing real-name system and appears designed to replicate one of Reddit’s biggest strengths – pseudonymous participation. Reddit currently hosts over 138,000 active communities and more than 121 million daily active users globally, with users often preferring anonymous or semi-anonymous discussion formats for sensitive topics, troubleshooting advice, hobbies, and personal experiences. Meta’s approach seems to combine Reddit-style usernames with Facebook-linked accountability, as moderators may still have access to the real identities tied to accounts.
In terms of availability, Forum is currently rolling out in a limited iOS release through Apple’s App Store in select regions. Meta has not yet announced a wider global or Android launch timeline for the app.
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Ashutosh is a Senior Writer at The Tech Portal, largely reporting on new tech, and intersection of technology and business. Ashutosh’s career spans across nearly a decade of technology writing across multiple platforms and languages.
