What just happened? When a big company like Meta launches a new product, we expect to see a big announcement and a lot of fanfare. That wasn't the case for Forum, a new app for accessing Facebook Groups that is being positioned as a Reddit rival.
The Forum app was spotted in Apple's storefront by Geekout Newsletter's Matt Navarra. According to the official description, it offers a dedicated space built for deeper discussions, real answers, and the communities users care about.
Using Forum requires a Facebook account, which you use to log into the app, and your existing groups, profile, and activity will carry across. Users will be able to pick anonymized usernames just like Reddit, but Group admins will be able to see their real identities.
– Matt Navarra (@MattNavarra) May 21, 2026
Forum differs from the regular Facebook feed by focusing almost entirely on conversations from Groups rather than mixing together posts from friends, Pages, recommended content, and whatever else Meta's algorithm thinks might keep you scrolling.
Meta says the feed is built around conversations from Groups, letting users see what real people are saying and jump back into discussions where they left off. The app also asks new users what topics they want to see more of, suggesting it will surface posts from Groups they don't already belong to.
Anything shared through Forum will still appear in the relevant Facebook Group, and posts made on Facebook should also be visible in Forum. Essentially, this doesn't replace Facebook Groups so much as strip them out of the main app and give them their own home.
Because this is Meta in 2026, there are AI features, naturally. One of them is called Ask, which pulls together responses from across groups so users can get answers without manually searching every community.
There's also an AI assistant that Meta says can help admins manage groups, moderate content, and keep communities healthy.
Facebook has tried this before. In 2017, the company shut down its standalone Groups app, saying it could do more for communities by shifting focus and resources back to the main Facebook app. As we noted at the time, the old app offered a cleaner, more focused interface for people active in several communities, but Facebook promised to make Groups better inside its main app instead. Forum suggests Meta has come back around to the idea that Groups might work better when singled out of Facebook's increasingly crowded feed.
Meta is no stranger to imitating others, so copying Reddit isn't a huge surprise. The platform has become one of the internet's most valuable repositories of human answers, advice, recommendations, and niche knowledge. Meta already has millions of Groups filled with exactly the sort of discussions people append "Reddit" to Google searches to find.
Meta said that it tests lots of products publicly to see what people find interesting and useful, so Forum may still be more experiment than full launch.