Meta Quietly Launches 'Forum,' to Give Users a Reddit-like Experience
The social media giant's latest product has arrived without fanfare.
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[Image source: Chetan Jha/MITSMR Middle East]
Social media conglomerate Meta has launched its latest offering to the public – a standalone platform called Forum, which is set to offer users a Reddit-like experience with AI features.
The new product shortly follows the launch of Instants in mid-May, a new offering which lets users share photos in the moment with their Close Friends or mutual followers. It is available as a feature on Instagram and as a standalone application.
Built around Facebook Groups, Forum is designed to be “a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers and communities you care about,” according to the app description.
Forum pulls together all the Facebook Groups a user belongs to into a separate engagement experience. The app is currently only available for iOS users located in the United States.
“We test lots of new products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful to their experiences across our apps,” said Feryal Hemamda, communications manager, Meta, as reported by The Verge.
While being a part of broader efforts by Meta to release more apps, it released Forum, keeping a low profile, without any public release or official statement.
Notably, this isn’t Meta’s first attempt at spinning Facebook Groups into a standalone experience. Back in 2014, Facebook launched a dedicated Groups app with a similar premise — making it simpler for users to share content within communities. The experiment was short-lived, however, and the app was pulled after just three years in 2017.
Meta appears to be gearing up for a wave of standalone social apps in the coming months, with AI-driven efficiencies enabling the company to build and ship products faster than ever before.
“So Chris and I have been talking about ‘all right, well, can we build 50 new apps?’ 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,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was quoted as saying, referring to Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox in a recent interview.
While Meta is betting big on the idea of consumers wanting more apps, what the actual demand looks like is unclear, as Meta’s newer products tend to be heavily inspired by existing platforms. For instance, Instants draws comparisons with Snapchat and BeReaL, Meta Edits with ByteDance’s Cap Cut, and Threads with X, formerly known as Twitter.
